Abstract
Hulled barley is one of the most frequently recovered cereals in European archaeological sites from Roman and medieval periods. In southern France this cereal is common in carbonized contexts such as cultural layers, ditches, pits, hearths, etc. The distinction between the two subspecies, two-rowed (Hordeum vulgare subsp. distichum L.) and six-rowed barley (H. vulgare subsp. vulgare L.) is usually based on morphological characters. The following criteria can be used to discriminate both subspecies from archaeological remains: the number of fertile spikelets per rachis segments, the linear or horseshoe shape depression of the lemma base, the maximum width of the caryopses and the proportion of twisted grains. The recovery of thousands of caryopses, some clearly twisted, and of rachis segments with sterile spikelets from the site of Petit Clos (Perpignan, Pyrénées-Orientales, France) dating to the Roman period suggests that both subspecies were cultivated during this time in southern Gaul. However evidence for two-rowed barley is usually scarce in archaeobotanical reports from Roman and medieval sites. To confirm the presence of two-rowed barley in the carbonized assemblage from Petit Clos and its cultivation, we developed a new method for analysing caryopses shape using geometric morphometrics with landmarks and sliding semi-landmarks. We compared modern reference specimens to the archaeological grains from several excavations from southern France dating from the 1st to the 11th century AD. Several varieties of both subspecies were correctly identified in the modern reference sample using GMM, both before and after carbonization. Archaeological specimens could then be accurately identified. The results confirm that both subspecies of barley were cultivated in southern France during the Roman period.
Highlights
Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) has been a staple food source for large portions of the world population since the advent of agriculture
We developed a new method of analysing the shape of caryopses using Geometric morphometrics (GMM)
At the sites of Petit Clos and Dassargues it is suggested that the grains were well preserved because they were charred as spikelets (Ros, 2009, 2010), which may explain why some of the archaeological grains bear a greater similarity in shape to the modern fresh grains than to the experimentally dehulled ones
Summary
Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) has been a staple food source for large portions of the world population since the advent of agriculture. Distichum L.(two-rowed barley) and H. vulgare subsp. Six-rowed forms appeared soon after during the 8th millennia cal BC, a period that shows evidence of increasing intensification of agriculture and domestication (Zohary et al, 2012). Two-rowed and six-rowed barley are both frequently found on the same sites in Greece from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age (Sarpaki, 1992). Tworowed barley has been identified in Neolithic sites in southern Italy (Constantini and Stancanelli, 1994), in three Roman sites in southern France, Le Villard A.D., Bouby, 2001) and Petit Clos A.D., Ros, 2010) and is suspected in an early medieval site in the same area of southern France, Manresa
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