This weekend, Rambla Prim in Barcelona has been buzzing with families and researchers at the 16th Science Festival. We participated in the event with a workshop on cereal cultivation and sustainable food, where children and their families interacted with large-scale reproductions of ancient cereal seeds and performed tasks of sample identification and classification. The activity was very well received, with the participation of about thirty people, including 15 children and their families. The workshop led to the discovery of Archaeobotany: a discipline that is not widely known in the popular imagination of Archaeology but is essential for understanding key aspects of past societies‘ daily life; such as food, agricultural practices, and trade routes. In the introductory phase of the workshop, we compared some of the most consumed cereals today with the wide variety of cereal species that existed in the prehistoric Mediterranean area. Using various graphic and plastic materials (a poster, reproductions of charred seeds, and images on paper), our researchers explained the most relevant aspects of their research methodology. Furthermore, the researchers explained the key aspects of the current research methodology in archaeobotany. They emphasized the collaboration with ancient seed banks (agrogenetics), our experimental cultivations in the Institute of Plant Breeding and Genetic…
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You can now register for the 43rd Conference of the Association for Environmental Archaeology, which will take place in Tarragona from 24-26 November 2023, hosted by the ICAC. The title for the conference is Telling Environmental Archaeology Stories, with which we aim to explore the contributions of environmental archaeology in creating history and how our research has helped…
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(Català a continuació) Would you like to be an archaeobotanist for a day? Join us this Sunday afternoon at the “Festa de la Ciència 2023” in Barcelona! Cultivating Knowledge: Deciphering the Seeds of the Past to Plant the FutureDid you know that from something as small as a seed, we can learn what our ancestors…
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The Catalan Association of Bioarchaeology organizes the VII Oikos Meeting of Bioarchaeology (VII Reunió Oikos de Bioarqueologia), which is conceived as a meeting space to favor the circulation and exchange of knowledge among all people who are interested in bioarchaeological research and the various disciplines that integrate it. The conference takes place on 26-27th May…
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Hèctor A. Orengo (ICREA Research Professor at ICAC) is presenting the methodology and preliminary results obtained for the identification of past agricultural strategies from grain shape, in the AEA Virtual Spring Conference (Association for Environmental Archaeology), which is taking place online on 13 May 2023. Extracting meaning from grain shape: a 3D deep learning workflow…
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The call for papers for the 43rd Conference of the Association for Environmental Archaeology, which will take place in Tarragona (Spain) next 24-26th November 2023, is open! Please submit your abstracts here: https://bit.ly/abstractsAEA2023Deadline 31 July 2023 23:59h CET Registration fees: Early bird (deadline 15/09/23) Regular (deadline 31/10/23) AEA member 80 € 100 € Non…
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Alexandra Kriti, PhD candidate at GIAP (ICAC), happily reports on her new grant: “I have recently been awarded the Small Research Grant of the Association for Environmental Archaeology (AEA). Every year, the AEA is offering a small number of grants to fund specific aspects of research projects concerning any area of environmental archaeology. The grant…
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In early April, we participated in an interdisciplinary experimental event in Greece involving burning and the effects of fire on articulated and semi-articulated animal carcasses, pottery and plant remains, which took place in Sokaras village, in Crete, Greece. The experiments took place in the context of the TEFRA project, which investigates the effects of fire on…
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Members of the Landscape Archaeology Research Group (GIAP) of the Catalan Institute of Classical Archaeology (ICAC) are coordinating the 43rd edition of the The Conference of the Association for Environmental Archaeology (AEA), which will be held in Tarragona (Spain) on 24–26 November 2023. Registration will open soon – Watch out for news on the conference page! The conference will start…
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PhD candidate Alexandra Kriti and Dr. Alexandra Livarda will participate in the TEFRA project’s event “Experimental approaches in archaeology: The funerary practice of cremation” (01-02/04/23), contributing to the experimental pyres through the lens of archaeobotany. More specifically, they will conduct experimental charring of contemporary grown cereals. Their aim is to investigate the impact of charring on the morphological characteristics of fresh cereal…
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