ID: 613 / 190

Category: Symposia

Track: Pending

Proposed Symposium Title: SEED MORPHOMETRY IN ARCHAEOBOTANY, NEW PERSPECTIVES AND FUTURE CHALLENGES

Abstract: Morphometric analysis has lately become a powerful tool in archaeobotanical research, offering a quantitative alternative and/or extension to conventional archaeobotanical procedures. Generally, the macro plant remains are identified by comparing the archaeobotanical materials with the modern reference collections conserved in the germplasm banks or by using images of seeds/fruits reported in various atlases, arriving at delineating distinctive characters only at the genus or species level. In the past two decades, to overcome the manual seed discrimination system, image morphometric analysis has received considerable attention in plant research using automated systems that have the potential to replace human visual assessments. Numerous works testify the importance of biometric characteristics, measured with computer vision techniques in taxonomic studies to characterize and identify wild and cultivated plant species and archaeobotanical remains. Numerous successes have been obtained in the recent applications of morphometric analysis for the identification of plant macro-remains such as charred, waterlogged seeds and wood charcoal. Furthermore, several scientific papers demonstrate that morphometric analysis appear complementary to molecular methods explaining domestication processes in a new perspective, by providing new data for aspects still little studied of archaeobotanical research, such as the role of landraces in early agriculture. The main purpose of this symposium is to bring together important research on these topics to share scientific knowledge and arrive at a standardization of image analysis methods applied to archaeobotany and consequently evaluate the interaction between human and plants in the past.

Speaker 1: Ucchesu Mariano Institut des Sciences de l’Évolution (ISEM), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) Université Montpellier, UMR 5554, CEDEX 05, 34095 Montpellier, France mariano.ucchesu@umontpellier.fr

Speaker 2: Cervantes Emilio IRNASA-CSIC, Cordel de Merinas, 40, 37008 Salamanca, Spain emilio.cervantes@irnasa.csic.es

Speaker 3: Murphy, Charlene University College London, London, United Kingdom charlene.murphy@ucl.ac.uk

Topics (Up to three): Paleobotany / Archaeobotany

Topic 2: Bioinformatics

Topic 3: Plant, Animal, and Microbe Interactions

Justification: Although much has already been done the challenges for morphometric research in archaeobotany remain numerous. First, the availability of standardized morphometric protocols which should be easily accessible to the scientific community. Secondly, the need to sensitize researchers of the great potential of morphometric analysis applied to plant remains. The symposium is a good opportunity to stimulate debate among scientists and outline new future challenges also outside Europe. The symposium will ensure representativeness in (1) geographical terms: we will include cases from several countries (2) diversity of speakers: they were chosen considering gender equity and with a good academic/scientific career.