In our last post reporting on our experimental cultivations you could see our greenhouse and our fields blooming in the spring and later already mature and yellow before the harvest. We had just begun the harvest after a challenging season with late rains and hoping for the best.
We are now extremely happy to report that during this first year the experiment has been a great success! We completed the harvest and all the material is now being classified, processed and stored in our facilities at the Institute of Plant Breeding and Genetic Resources (IPBGR), Elgo Demeter, at Thessaloniki, Greece.
The summer is an extremely busy period and members of our team have been working long hours as well as meeting constantly to discuss the project, our results so far and the next steps to take.
We are currently taking all sorts of measurements, assessing our yield, our grains, how well the different varieties did and we will be slowly selecting the grains to plant next autumn. Our PhD candidate, Alexandra Kriti has been instrumental in much of this work and her dedication has been key to the success of this first year of our experiments!
This is a truly collaborative project between archaeologists and agronomists, merging our respective expertise to come out with better methodological tools but also innovative results for both disciplines. We have been enjoying learning from each other and designing the future of our disciplines!
This project has been funded by:
· DarkRevisited. The Aegean ‘Dark Ages’ revisited: a novel approach to old debates on agricultural economy and food culture (2020-2023)
Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, PID2019-107605GB-I00
· iShape3DSeed. Creating a novel, innovative toolkit for the identification of agricultural management regimes in the past using seed shape (2020-2022)
European Research Area H2020-MSCA-IF-2019, 892502
