SC - Columbus' chilies

[Jenne Heise]

> What apparently happened is that the Roman farming practices were 
> not efficient, and they never heard of crop rotation or letting a field go 
> fallow to replenish the soil. as the soil grew more impoverished, and 
> yeilds decreased, the Romans simply expanded the fields to makeup 
> the difference.
> They effectively Agriculturally "stripmined" much of Noth Africa.
> a very similar cause and effect to the Dust Bowl catastrophe of 
> Midwestern America 70 - 80 years ago.

Also, there was apparently a period of heavy rainfall in North Africa
around the 6th century BC which would have moved back the borders...

However, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica:

'Despite all this, trans-Saharan trade along caravan routes linking
oases has persisted from very early times. Most of the principal
routes were west of the Tibesti Mountains and tended to shift
somewhat over time, although the easternmost of these--which ran
northward from Lake Chad to Bilma (now in Niger) and through the
Fezzan region to Tripoli--was used continuously through the
centuries. East of the Tibesti Mountains oases are few, but the darb
al-arba'in ("road of the forty [days]"), west of the Nile, was a
former slave route. Gold, ivory, slaves, and salt were major items of
trade in the earlier days..'

Now, slaves are more perishable than spices, and spices are lighter than
gold. IF you are already moving gold and slaves, throwing some grains of
paradise in with the baggage is probably not that big a deal. 

Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, mka Jennifer Heise	      jenne at tulgey.browser.net
disclaimer: i speak for no-one and no-one speaks for me.
   "My hands are small I know, but they're not yours, they are my own"