AskHistorians

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Recently heard in a video about Babylonia that a date plantation was up to 4x more productive in calories than a comparable wheat plantation, tho took 7 years to mature. Were there any societies whose staple food was derived from silvoculture? Or more broadly, not from grasses or tubers?	1024
The explosion of Scandinavia in the Viking Age is generally portrayed as unprovoked & oppurtunistic raiding in English language stories. But to what degree was it in reaction to Carolingian consolidation & christianization?	49
Medieval books and movies often depict pigs (sometimes goats and poultry) roaming free and unminded in urban streets like housecats are today. Did this actually happen? If so, how did you find them again/identify them? and how did you secure them from theft in a city?	43
Judaism, famously non-proselytizing, was nevertheless adopted by the ruling dynasty of Yemen in the 5th century and the elite of the Khazars in the 8th and 9th. How did this happpen?	30
I am an Erie at the end of the Beaver War and I've been adopted by the Seneca. What's it like for me? If I have surviving family do I welcome it—or is it imposed?	10
The Low Countries had the highest population density in Europe in the Middle Ages. Why?	6
Was Ēostre/Easter/spring really the predominant season for the conception of babies in either pre-Christian or Medieval Northern Europe? Or were births generally spread throughout the year?	6
Is there any record of canning and/or hermetic preservation of food prior to Appert in 1809? Were there any granary technologies that came close? And if not, where—under alternate conditions—might modern food preservation have developed?	4
c508 BC clans in Attica were reorganized w/1/3 urban, 1/3 coastal, 1/3 interior makeup. This ~resembles Andean ayllus settling relatives in different zones of the vertical archipelago. How common was this in decentralized / city-state / clan milieus?	2
What historic domesticated or human-adjascent animal is most radically or surprisingly different from its modern perception? Or has had its traditional form most obscured by its modern image?	1

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