The experimental cultivations in Thermi, at the facilities of Hellenic Agricultural Organization-DEMETER, near Thessaloniki (Greece), have started again! This time, in the framework of the new I+D project ‘DarkAegean’ led by Dr Alexandra Livarda in collaboration with the agronomers Dr Ioannis Mylonas (Institute of Plant Breeding and Genetic Resources) and Dr Elisa Ninou (International Hellenic…
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Good news to start the year! The resolution of the Ministry of Science and Innovation (Spanish Government) granted our new R&D project: DarkAegean. The agricultural economy of the Aegean Dark Ages through machine learning-powered 3D cereal grain morphometrics (01/09/2023 – 31/08/2026)Agencia Estatal de Investigación (PID2022-139907NB-I00) The DarkAegean project, led by Ramón y Cajal researcher Alexandra Livarda, explores the innovative hypothesis…
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This weekend, Alexandra Kriti and Alexandra Livarda will participate in two events, presenting the preliminary results on the experimental pyres, real-life charring experiments that took place in Crete a few months ago, in the context of Kriti’s PhD thesis and the DarkRevisited project. First, Alexandra Kriti presented in a two-day workshop in the context of…
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Today, PhD candidate Alexandra Kriti will participate in the round table ‘Primary Resources and Environmental History’, organised by the Hellenic Association of Environmental History, which is taking place at the Historic Archive of the National and Kapodistrian University, Athens, Greece. She was invited to present and discuss her research resources and methods. Environmental history in…
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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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(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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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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