Girolamo Fiorentino

Università del Salento | Unisalento · cultural heritage

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...

The complexity of agricultural practices in the Bronze Age in Apulia (southeast Italy): the contribution of the archaeobotanical morphometric analysis on Vicia faba L.

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 (...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

Over the last millennia, the land between the Alps and the Mediterranean sea, characterized by extraordinary habitat diversity, has seen an outstanding cross-cultural development. They cover a large time scale, from the prehistoric through the protohistoric Iron Age, right up to the historical and modern times, and a variety of contexts that make t...

Over the last millennia, the land between the Alps and the Mediterranean sea, characterized by extraordinary habitat diversity, has seen an outstanding cross-cultural development. They cover a large time scale, from the prehistoric through the protohistoric Iron Age, right up to the historical and modern times, and a variety of contexts that make t...

In recent decades the analysis of stable isotopes in plants has become a useful method to infer natural and anthropogenic effects on the growing conditions of plants. Here we present a review of the state-of-the-art regarding the use of stable isotopes in plant macroremains. After providing a brief theoretical and methodological background, we will...

Charred plant materials found in archaeological contexts are usually considered the most reliable remains for radiocarbon dating. Usually, seeds and fruits are preferred to wood fragments because their short lifecycle reduces the range of uncertainty of the C-14 measurement. A selection of short-lived samples, mainly from barley and wheat, from the...

Charred plant materials found in archaeological contexts are usually considered the most reliable remains for radiocarbon dating. Usually, seeds and fruits are preferred to wood fragments because their short lifecycle reduces the range of uncertainty of the 14 C measurement. A selection of short-lived samples, mainly from barley and wheat, from the...

This paper presents an integrated archaeobotanical analysis carried out at the site known as “El Llano de la Horca”, a Bronze and Late Iron Age (3rd–1st century b.c.) Carpetanian settlement in central Spain (3600 ± 80 b.p.). Pollen and spore analysis indicates an open landscape dominated by the herb taxa Asteraceae, Chenopodiaceae and Poaceae with...

The objective of our research was to define the main human–environment interactions during the Neolithic period (6500–3700 bc) in the Apulia region of southeastern Italy based on available published and unpublished data. Knowledge of these interactions is crucial to understanding the cultural and social dynamics of the period, particularly concerni...

While some consensus exists about the roles of southwestern China and northeastern India in the origin and diversification of the genus Citrus, the scarcity of its archaeological remains, as well as some methodological limits in unequivocally identifying taxa, do not facilitate reconstruction of the tempo and mode of spread of the genus towards oth...

Archaeological research conducted in Gujarat (North‐Western Indian Peninsula) has revealed intense human occupation during the Mesolithic and Bronze Age periods. Recently, the North Gujarat Archaeological Project (NoGAP) has initiated a series of investigations to understand socio‐ ecological dynamics in this area through the systematic collection...