Celine Kerfant

Pompeu Fabra University | UPF · Department of Humanities

We are worried about how rapidly climate change is affecting life on Earth at many levels. This questionnaire aims to explore the impact of archaeological conferences. Please, if you have 10 minutes to spare consider answering. Data will be processed anonymously. Thank you in advance! You can participate until Friday 18th October https://form...

In the past decades, two antinomic hypotheses were developed in tropical prehistory. Scholars qualified tropical forests as “green deserts” and considered them inhospitable before the emergence of agriculture. Other archaeologists working in Southeast Asia rather thought that humans adapted so much to tropical forests that it impacted their technol...

The open research movement has gained momentum in the last decade and no academic can ignore the necessity to make research more open, as it improves reliability, sustainability and reusability of data. In this paper, we present the results of a community-based survey concerning the extent to which open practices are known and applied within the ph...

The aim of this project is to gather information on the properties of the plants selected to make ropes and basketry. These multi-functional objects extend the fibrous properties of plants, and often offer practical and sustainable solutions to the problems of over-exploitation and misuse of petrochemical materials.

Climate change, with its expression in the current mounting climate crisis, is threatening life on Earth as we know it. It is already affecting millions of people, their environments, and livelihoods, with extreme weather events: drought and heat in some places; torrential rains and flooding in others. Beyond these devastating consequences for huma...

Phytolith research contributes to our understanding of plant-related studies such as plant use in archaeological contexts and past landscapes in palaeoecology. This multi-disciplinarity combined with the specificities of phytoliths themselves (multiplicity, redundancy, naming issues) produces a wide variety of methodologies. Combined with a lack of...

A large part of our material culture is made of organic materials, and this was likely the case also during prehistory. Amongst this prehistoric organic material culture are textiles and cordages, taking advantage of the flexibility and resistance of plant fibres. While in very exceptional cases and under very favourable circumstances, fragments of...

Underwater operations conducted along the southern French coast have unveiled two large, isolated anchors of iron. The largest ever found in the ancient Mediterranean, they reveal that Roman merchantmen moored in Aigues-Mortes Bay. A combination of analyses focusing on the ring, which belonged to one of the two anchors, offered the opportunity to c...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Cotton ( Gossypium sp.), a plant of tropical and sub-tropical origin, appeared at several sites on the Arabian Peninsula at the end of the 1st mill. BCE-beginning of the 1st mill. CE. Its spread into this non-native, arid environment is emblematic of the trade dynamics that took place at this pivotal point in human history. Due to its geographical...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Neanderthals are often considered as less technologically advanced than modern humans. However, we typically only find faunal remains or stone tools at Paleolithic sites. Perishable materials, comprising the vast majority of material culture items, are typically missing. Individual twisted fibres on stone tools from the Abri du Maras led to the hyp...

The existence of an organic or plant-based technology during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene is an ongoing debate in Island Southeast Asia (ISEA). Evidence of plant-based technologies in the current archaeological record of ISEA is very limited. Nevertheless, excavations of prehistoric sites across the region have provided clues that plants...

Fans, called tah’i, coming from the Marquesas Islands, are understood to be prestigious objects but they remain mysterious, particularly for the identification of the vegetal fibres from which they were made and the technical know-how of their fabrication, which has now been lost. These difficulties call for new investigative methods. Our study wil...

Most of plants belonging to Zingiberales are well-known for their nutritious and medicinal properties, and much less for their good fiber property. Some of them such as Donax canniformis (Marantaceae), Musa textilis (Musaceae) and Alpinia speciosa (Zingiberaceae) among others in this order, are made into specific basketries in Taiwan and the Philip...

Plant materials are central to many human activities from those of daily life to the exceptional events. The Philippines, with more than 7000 islands, has numerous plant species, many of them endemic. Taiwan has both tropical and subtropical areas and its plant diversity includes a great variety of fibre-producing species. These islands are isolate...

La fouille d’un bâtiment incendié à Mleiha (E.A.U.) en 2010 et 2011 daté de la fin de la période Pré-Islamique Récente (3ème siècle de notre ère) a permis la mise au jour de matériel organique carbonisé conservé de manière exceptionnelle (fibres, textiles, graines) appartenant à du coton. Cette découverte nous donne un éclairage nouveau sur les tec...