The great malaria problem and its solution

sign of the diffusion of Chinese technology; to the textual and ethnographic sources noted by the authors, a large once-molten slag flow recently excavated by Coughenour in an Ayyubid-Mamluk ironworking area near Ajlun, Jordan can now be added as further evidence of the introduction of blast-furnace technology in medieval Islamic times. In a work of this scope, some minor lapses are inevitable. The photograph of the straining of yoghurt to make yoghurt curd (fig. 8.25) is incorrectly described in the caption as making yoghurt, a process which would have occurred the previous day when the starter was added to scalded milk and left overnight to set. While Bulliet's recent study of paper and printing in medieval Islam appeared after this book was in print, familiarity with the published results of 1 970s excavations at Fustat and Quseir would have enabled the authors to note that, within a few centuries of the Sung development of block printing, a range of apotropaic magical texts similar to those which first appeared in China were being printed on paper in Egypt. The only serious failing is the reliance on Watson's study of agriculture, with the consequent failure to take account of pre-Islamic evidence for the origin of such cultigens as bread wheat, which may occur much earlier than Islamic times, and watermelons, which are known from classical, cuneiform and Hebrew texts as well as pharaonic sources. None of Watson's claims for the origins of cultigens can be accepted until palaeobotanical studies of Ptolemaic, Coptic, Parthian, Sassanian and Arabian sites of the third century Bc-sixth century AD are completed. Similarly, while the great economies of scale enabled by innovations in credit and accounting and the state organization of agricultural production, such as occurred in sugar production, are noteworthy in early Islam, state control of irrigation was not new, and multiple cropping of irrigated fields under central administration was a feature of both Egyptian and Mesopotamian agricultural regimes well before the advent of Islam. An important aspect of nutritional history which also needs to be investigated was the role played by later Islamic agricultural technology in the diffusion of New World cultigens and the readiness to experiment with new food sources which led to maize being cultivated in West Africa, Indonesia and the eastern Mediterranean within ten to twenty years of the first contacts with the Americas. In Europe, where maize was known as "Turkey wheat", …