Girolamo Fiorentino

Girolamo Fiorentino
University of Salento | Unisalento · cultural heritage

PhD

About

161
Publications
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2,144
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Publications

Publications (161)
Article
Archaeological campaigns carried out at the emporic sanctuary of Gravisca (Tarquinia, Italy) have revealed extraordinary evidence for ritual depositions and ceremonies linked to the divinities/guarantors of the sanctuary. The ritual of one such deposition was reconstructed using a multidisciplinary approach, comprising an in-depth analysis of the s...
Article
Organic residue analysis (ORA) is a valuable tool for the study of ancient diets, but conventional methods remain limited in terms of taxonomic identification or to resolve mixtures. Here, we propose a method to further explore a class of compounds—triacylglycerols (TAGs)—using high‐resolution mass spectrometry to overcome these limitations in an a...
Article
Full-text available
This paper presents a summary of the record of the cultivated plant macroremains from southern Italy during the early Middle Ages, with a focus on the recent discoveries of crop remains in Sicily. These have shed light on the introduction of new plants in the central Mediterranean region at ca. 500-1100 ce. Specifically, we are dealing with the fir...
Chapter
Bringing together a wide array of modern scientific techniques and interdisciplinary approaches, this book provides an accessible guide to the methods that form the current bedrock of research into Roman, and more broadly ancient, wine. Chapters are arranged into thematic sections, covering biomolecular archaeology and chemical analysis, archaeobot...
Article
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The paper presents the results of the first investigations at the Bronze Age cremation cemetery of Torre Guaceto, near Brindisi, which led to the identification and excavation of four cremation burials (Tomba no. 1-4), as well as different sequences of post-holes. Thanks to 14C dates and typological features of ceramic and metals finds, these buria...
Article
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We present direct evidence of early grape domestication in southern Italy via a multidisciplinary study of pip assemblage from one site, shedding new light on the spread of viticulture in the western Mediterranean during the Bronze Age. This consist of 55 waterlogged pips from Grotta di Pertosa, a Middle Bronze Age settlement in the south of the It...
Poster
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Archaeological domestic contexts, with their hearths, ovens, pits, and waste heaps inside and outside dwellings represent an important source of information on the use of plants and of space by ancient communities. The potential of this information increases especially in the presence of well-preserved archaeological levels, which have undergone fi...
Poster
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We present the preliminary results of anthracological analysis carried out in two nearby protohistoric coastal sites: the cremation necropolis of Torre Guaceto (MBA3- RBA2) and the fortified settlement of Scogli di Apani (MBA2-3) near Brindisi (Apulia, Southern Italy). This work aims to recognize the dynamics of exploitation of vegetal resources in...
Article
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Isotopic analyses of prehistoric diet have only recently reached the threshold of going beyond site-focused reports to provide regional syntheses showing larger trends. In this work we present the first regional analysis for Neolithic southeastern Italy as a whole, including both substantial original data and a review of the available published dat...
Article
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From the 9th to 14th centuries AD, Sicily experienced a series of rapid and quite radical changes in political regime, but the impact of these regime changes on the lives of the people that experienced them remains largely elusive within the historical narrative. We use a multi-faceted lipid residue approach to give direct chemical evidence of the...
Article
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Il lavoro contiene una sintesi dei dati inediti relativi le offerte vegetali rinvenute nei depositi votivi dell'altare nel Santuario di Atena a Castro (LE). Le analisi archeobotaniche hanno permesso di caratterizzare le primizie offerte alla divinità nel corso del rituale di fondazione dell'altare, ma anche di individuare importanti resti di cibo d...
Poster
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The complexity of agricultural practices in the Bronze Age in Apulia (southeast Italy): the contribution of the archaeobotanical morphometric analysis on Vicia faba L.
Article
This study aims to understand the relationship between the palaeoenvironmental evolution of the southern margin of the Salpi lagoon (Tavoliere coastal plain, Apulia, Italy) and the development of settlements on its shores during the last part of the Holocene (Late Northgrippian to Late Meghalayan) to complement recent archaeological investigations...
Poster
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By cross-referencing information provided by ancient sources and archaeobotanical data on archaeological remains of cereal doughs found in Messapian sites in Salento, it is possible to draw a picture of cereal food production in Apulia during the Hellenistic age. The recovery of historical knowledge of cereal-based food products and cooking techniq...
Article
Full-text available
Medieval flax routes: New findings from the Byzantine context at Rocchicella di Mineo (CT). Up until recent times, the cultivation of flax (Linum usitatissimum L.) ensured there was a raw material available for several different essential products. It was one of the first plants to be used for textiles, thanks to the processing of the cellulose fi...
Chapter
The 16th century was a period of fundamental changes and transformations that revolutionized many aspects of life. Several innovations were also made in different areas, including agriculture: the Age of Exploration was already started and new plants were introduced from new continents to the Old World. But, from an archaeobotanical point of view,...
Chapter
Full-text available
Spatial analyses have been increasingly used to investigate behavioural patterns and human activities in archaeological and ethnoarchaeological studies. For the Bronze Age in the central Mediterranean spatial analyses integrating various ranges of data, from artefacts to ecofacts, still remain limited in number. Moreover, studies have mainly focuss...
Conference Paper
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Adaptation and Resilience on island contexts: the case of Aeolian Archipelago – Island territories have always been considered representative laboratories in the analysis of natural, social and historical dynamics. In this case, archaeological data from the Early and Middle Bronze age settlements on Aeolian Archipelago were crossed with archaeobota...
Article
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Studies of the origins of agriculture in the Near East have revealed that the eight plant species known as “Founder Crops”, i.e. emmer, einkorn, barley, lentils, peas, chickpeas, bitter vetch and flax, derived from annual self-pollinating wild predecessors, were all domesticated in roughly the same period. Recent research however has prompted new d...
Article
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Sicily, during the 9th-12th century AD, thrived politically, economically, and culturally under Islamic political rule and the capital of Palermo stood as a cultural and political centre in the Mediterranean Islamic world. However, to what extent the lifeways of the people that experienced these regimes were impacted during this time is not well un...
Article
Full-text available
La fava (Vicia faba L.) è stata tra le prime piante a essere domesticata. La coltivazione di questo ortaggio ha permesso all’uomo di avere facilmente a disposizione alimenti altamente proteici, foraggio per gli animali e fertilizzante naturale per i campi. Questi aspetti, unitamente alla facilità di coltivazione e al ciclo di produzione alternativo...
Chapter
Full-text available
The book brings together 16 contributions on the ancient and recent history of citrus fruits. Although they represent the main fruit production on a worldwide scale, very little is known about their original domestication and routes of introduction into the Mediterranean and temperate Europe: few organic remains identified as citrus have been found...
Research
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Over the course of a wildly prolific career, dendrochronologist and wood anatomist Fritz H. Schweingruber would repeatedly enter some area, contribute to several of its problems and create new fields of study in the process. His stomping grounds were dendrochronology and wood anatomy, disciplines that interconnect to botany, ecology, climatology an...
Conference Paper
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We are glad to inform you that session titled Interdisciplinary Studies on Cultural Landscape of South–Eastern Sicily is accepted for the Jubilee Conference “The Past Has a Future!” at Institute of Archaeology, University of Warsaw.
Article
Oak charcoals recovered from archaeological sites can yield information of fundamental importance to our understanding of human economic and cultural development over time and the ecological setting in which this took place. To this end, the present paper describes the anatomical patterns of modern semideciduous and deciduous oaks and those of char...
Conference Paper
Part of the session: Upscaling palaeoecological, archaeological and historical records of land-use and land-cover change 1. Chair Marie-Jose Gaillard. Presentation abstact :The PAGES LandCover6K group is concerned with whether prehistoric human impacts on land cover were sufficiently large to have had a major impact on regional and global climate...
Poster
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The Roman villa of Villamagna, in the ager of the colony of Pollentia-Urbs Salvia, covers a long time-span between the 1st century BC and the 7th century AD. Later, on its ruins, or the Hill on which it stands, will be built the castle of Villamaina, razed in 1191 and abandoned in 1422. The roman villa is characterised by a pars massaricia and a pa...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Different ways have been used by human societies to transform cereals into food: gruels, porridges, soups, breads, alcoholic beverages are examples of the rich variability observed in ancient and modern culinary practice. Our presentation explores the possible ways in which cereals could have been consumed in antiquity, integrating ancient written...
Conference Paper
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18° IWGP2019-2nd Circular and call for abstract Dear Colleagues, We are pleased to inform you that more than two-hundred and seventy peers submitted pre-registration forms to 18 Th IWGP that will be hosted in Lecce at the University of Salento. You are invited to submit an abstract for consideration as an oral or poster presentation. If you choose...
Conference Paper
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The conference will be hosted at the University of Salento (https://www.unisalento.it/) in the heart of Lecce. In order to organize our scientific activities during the week, participants are kindly requested to fill in the pre-registration form, with your personal information, a provisional title of your oral or poster presentation and the session...
Poster
Full-text available
In this paper we try to integrate the archaeobotanical analysis with the archaeological data to reconstruct the ritual practices of a cultic place in southeastern Italy. The ancient site of Castrum Minervae, occupied since the II millennium BC, is located on a slight hill along the Adriatic coast of the Salento Peninsula, 47 km south from Lecce (It...
Article
Full-text available
Il testo che segue riguarda la nostra ricerca archeologica sulla Sicilia bizantina, islamica e normanno-sveva e in particolare riporta le ultime scoperte a Castronovo di Sicilia, che includono il riconoscimento di una chiesa del XII-XIII secolo sul Monte Kassar, la continuazione dello scavo a Casale San Pietro e una sintesi delle nuove ricognizioni...
Article
Full-text available
Well-preserved finds of sacrificial cakes from the Sanctuary of Demeter at Monte Papalucio (Oria, southern Italy, VI-III cent. B.C.) are among the most famous bread-like remains from the ancient Mediterranean region. These unusual finds represent direct and rare evidence of the food products offered as part of religious practice by the indigenous (...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The scope of the laboratory is to extend the knowledge about identification of legumes, with theoretical and practical approaches for the study of their anatomical features. Morphological characteristics used by archaeobotanists to identify legumes are rarely illustrated or described. The earliest attempt to provide criteria for the identification...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The Lab session on image analysis at the 18th IWGP intends to provide participants with an overview of the major techniques used to analyzed seed shape. These involve fitting some type of curve to the seed’s outline, with the resulting coefficients then beingused as variables for statistical analysis. There are several approaches that can be used...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
A major problem for the identification of millets is the large number of small-seeds species that belong to this group which present similar morphological characteristics. The lab session at the 18 th IWGP aims to refine the criteria used for the identification of millets that are found in archaeological sites and provide general guidelines for arc...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The lab session is structured to train participants on how to differentiate between tetraploid and hexaploid wheat to ensure that this important distinction does not go unremarked in the archaeobotanical assemblage. The presence of tetraploid naked wheat was first reported by Hillmann (1983), who defined the rachis criteria for the identification...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The Laboratory session at the 18th IWGP emphasizes a hands-on approach to identify the ‘New’ Glume Wheat (NGW) based on the morphology of the grains’ spikelet. The first identification, in 2000, of a new type of hulled wheat in Greece by Jones and colleagues paved the way for the study of this ‘new’ species that shares anatomical features of both th...
Article
Full-text available
Il testo che segue riguarda la nostra ricerca archeologica sulla Sicilia bizantina, islamica e normanno-sveva e in particolare riporta le ultime scoperte a Castronovo di Sicilia, che includono il riconoscimento di una chiesa del XII-XIII secolo sul Monte Kassar, la continuazione dello scavo a Casale San Pietro e una sintesi delle nuove ricognizioni...
Article
Full-text available
The BRAIN (Botanical Records of Archaeobotany Italian Network) database and network was developed by the cooperation of archaeobotanists working on Italian archaeological sites. Examples of recent research including pollen or other plant remains in analytical and synthetic papers are reported as an exemplar reference list. This paper retraces the m...
Chapter
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The discovery of remains of daub, especially burned, is very common in Italian pre- and protohistoric sites. This collective work aims to summarize the researches carried out over the last thirty years in Italian contexts of the Late Prehistory, from the Neolithic to the Iron Age. The subjects considered in this paper will be the selection of raw m...
Poster
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The site of Gravisca, situated about ten kilometres from Tarquinia (the ancient Tarkna), represents one of the most important harbours of antiquity. It was a crossroad of goods and people in the centre of the Mediterranean area between the end of the 7th century BC and the Roman period. It constitutes extraordinary evidence of an emporic sanctuary,...
Chapter
Full-text available
This paper presents the results of the first archaeobotanical investigation carried out by the University of Salento archaeological team during the 2015 field season at the site of Amheida/ Trimithis in Dakhla Oasis, Egypt. The bulk of the recovered material consists of seeds and fruits from midden deposits that lay under the foundation of an upper...
Article
Tree-ring studies, particularly those focusing on the δ13C isotopic signal, have become a reliable method to reconstruct past climatic and environmental conditions. Unfortunately, wood remains are notably absent from the very ancient archaeological record, due to degradability of plant tissue. For archaeological studies, the analysis of isotopic si...
Chapter
Medieval agriculture, food, diet, trade and environment in Southern Italy Plant remains from excavations are one of several sources of evidence that can be brought to bear on studies of medieval agriculture, food, diet, trade and environment. This paper provides a brief overview of the main achievements of archaeobotanical work for Middle Ages arc...
Book
http://books.openedition.org/pcjb/2107?lang=fr The book brings together 16 contributions on the ancient and recent history of citrus fruits. Although they represent the main fruit production on a worldwide scale, very little is known about their original domestication and routes of introduction into the Mediterranean and temperate Europe: few orga...
Poster
Full-text available
Background. In 2015, a paper on the archaeobotany as a key tool ‘for the understanding of the bio-cultural diversity of the Italian landscape’ gave rise to a new initiative, the realization of the first cooperative network of archaeobotanists and palynologists working on archaeological sites located in Italy. The Botanical Record of Archaeobotany I...
Chapter
Le site de Campo delle Piane (Abruzzes) est connu depuis le milieu du XXe siècle grâce aux travaux de deux archéologues préhistoriens, G. B. Leopardi et A. M. Radmilli. Longtemps considéré comme un des rares témoignages d’habitat de plein air du Paléolithique récent, de nombreuses interrogations demeuraient sur son attribution chrono-culturelle et...
Chapter
The book brings together 16 contributions on the ancient and recent history of citrus fruits. Although they represent the main fruit production on a worldwide scale, very little is known about their original domestication and routes of introduction into the Mediterranean and temperate Europe: few organic remains identified as citrus have been found...
Chapter
The book brings together 16 contributions on the ancient and recent history of citrus fruits. Although they represent the main fruit production on a worldwide scale, very little is known about their original domestication and routes of introduction into the Mediterranean and temperate Europe: few organic remains identified as citrus have been found...
Article
In ancient DNA (aDNA) research, evolutionary and archaeological questions are often investigated using the genomic sequences of organelles: mitochondrial and chloroplast DNA. Organellar genomes are found in multiple copies per living cell, increasing their chance of recovery from archaeological samples, and are inherited from one parent without gen...
Article
Full-text available
Ubi minor… Le isole minori del Mediterraneo centrale dal Neolitico ai primi contatti coloniali Convegno di Studi in ricordo di Giorgio Buchner, a 100 anni dalla nascita (1914-2014) Anacapri, 27 ottobre – Capri, 28 ottobre – Ischia/Lacco Ameno, 29 ottobre 2014 a cura di Alberto Cazzella, Alessandro Guidi e Federico Nomi
Article
The socio-cultural dynamics of the Bronze Age communities of Apulia (S-E Italy) during the 2nd millennium BC represent a crucial moment in the history of the relationship between humans and nature. Over the last few decades, several studies have highlighted the complex pattern of Late Holocene climate shifts across the Mediterranean region and the...
Technical Report
Full-text available
The 2012 NoGAP fieldwork in northern Gujarat (India) has been carried out through the sixth and seventh field seasons, based on a cooperation agreement between the Institució Milà i Fontanals and the MS University of Baroda. Specifically, the campaigns took place btween 11th February and 12th March 2013, and between 19th Aprl and 26th April 2013. T...
Chapter
Full-text available
The 2012 NoGAP fieldwork in northern Gujarat (India) has been carried out through the sixth and seventh field seasons, based on a cooperation agreement between the Institución Milá y Fontanals and the MS University of Baroda. Specifically, the campaigns took place between 11th February and 12th March 2013, and between 19th April and 26th April 2013...