Format: ORAL

Irene Teixidor-Toneu1,2*, Anneleen Kool2, Simon J. Greenhill3,4, Karoline Kjesrud5, Jade J. Sandstedt2, Fiona M. Jordan6

1 Mediterranean Institute for Biodiversity and Ecology, French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development, Marseille, France 2 Natural History Museum, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway 3 Australian National University College of Arts and Social Sciences, ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Canberra, Australia 4 Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, Max-Planck-Institut fur Menschheitsgeschichte, Jena, Germany 5 Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway 6 Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

Knowledge of plants is dynamic and can change at rapid time scales. Grasping past human-plant relations is largely concomitant to having historical and archaeological evidence. Yet, apart from major crops, this is uncommon for most social-ecological systems and time periods. This presentation will outline a multi-disciplinary triangulation method that combines inferences of ancestral plant uses by a cultural evolutionary approach with historical, linguistic, and archaeobotanical evidence (Teixidor-Toneu et al 2021). Phylogenetic comparative methods that use linguistic phylogenies representing peoples historical relations are applied to ethnobotanical data. Results fill gaps of evidence and link data sources for the study of past human-plant relations. The triangulation method will be illustrated by taking the Nordic countries as a case study, as extensive historical collections of various plant use records are very limited until the 1700s and there is also limited direct evidence of plant use from archaeological contexts. A language tree models the population history of the Nordic region and allows to computationally infer ancestral plant uses from recent ethnographic data. We evidence a wealth of Viking-age plant uses, especially for medicine and food. All plants for which ancestral uses were inferred by phylogenetic comparative methods had vernacular names with shared North Germanic word roots, confirming the past knowledge and importance of these species. We inferred the ancestral use of a diversity of species (such as Angelica archangelica or Juniperus communis) and uses (wild foods, beer and mead brewing) whose cultural history had been overlooked in botanical or archaeological studies. This multi-disciplinary triangulation method evidences that while most plant use knowledge may quickly arise and fade through time, some human-plant relations persist through centuries shaping both culture and the environment.