Periodic Reporting for period 2 - FEDD (Fruits of Eurasia: Domestication and Dispersal)
Período documentado: 2021-07-01 hasta 2022-12-31
The FEDD team is composed of an international group of top research specialists, with areas of specialty covering archaeobotany, history, art history, linguistics, ancient genetics, and molecular methods (ancient proteomics and metabolites). Collectively, these specialists are pooling their knowledge and data to answer linked questions about the movement of crops on these ancient trade routes. The team has collected archaeobotanical samples for 13 archaeological sites over the past 2.5 years and plans to work at another 10 sites (covering 6 countries). These studies have already revealed earlier evidence for cultivation and consumption of plants across this region than was previously thought. The archaeobotanical assemblage consists of hundreds of thousands of individually identified and quantified ancient seeds or plant parts. In some cases, these ancient remains are desiccated and are therefore suitable for further analysis via ancient genetics, which will further illustrate the processes of domestication for certain crops and the paths of their dispersals.
While archaeobotany provides the central dataset in this study, we are careful not to neglect other complementary lines of data and historians that we are collaborating with have linked the plants we are finding in these archaeological sites to Sogdian, Turkic, Arabic, Chinese, and Classical texts. Likewise, artistic depictions of plants in wall paintings at sites, such as Panjikent, and on ceramic vessels are key to understanding the timing and spread of certain crops, notably melons, pomegranates, and grapes. The words used to name plants also provide important clues towards understanding their origins, and linguists are assisting us in fitting these data into the broader interpretations. Additionally, we have collaborations with an ancient genomics specialists and a postdoc on the project, who will help process these data. Given that it would be unfeasible to run ancient genomics samples for all of the crops that we are working with on this study, we are focusing on the large-fruiting members of the Prunus genus – plums, peaches, and apricots. We are focusing on this economically significant group because their origins and processes of dispersal remain poorly understood, but also because they are far more likely to preserve in a desiccated state in archaeological sites, leaving viable genetic material. This project represents a collaborative international endeavor, spanning halves of two continents and top research experts from around the globe.
Given the complexities of the domestication process for plums, and the number of continual hybridization events that clearly led to the modern plum, there is only so much that can be done in studying domestication in this group from an archaeobotanical perspective. The FEDD team is using multivariate statistics and geometric morphometric analyses to better parse out morphological differences between populations of ancient plums, as recovered from archaeological sites across Europe and West Asia. However, even with these advanced methods, the continual hybridization of populations lead to a melding of measurable traits. Therefore, members of the FEDD team have been collecting desiccated and waterlogged plum pits to use for an ancient genomics analysis. The resulting data will fit into an existing database on modern population genetics in Prunus, as assembled through herbarium and germplasm facilities. Ultimately, we expect these results to further clarify the domestication and dispersal process for this important set of tree crops.