ARCHAEOBOTANY FOR CULTURAL HERITAGE: THE PICAR PROJECT AND CULTURAL LANDSCAPE RECONSTRUCTIONS IN CIRCUM-MEDITERRANEAN COUNTRIES.

The PICAR project (2010-2012) aims to study the cultural landscape genesis and develpment in Mediterranean countries. The acronym means Cultural landscaPe and human Impact in Circum-mediterranean countries: multidisciplinary Archaeobotanical research for environmental, phylogeographic, climatic and virtual Reconstructions (Paesaggio culturale e Impatto antropico in paesi Circum-mediterranei: ricerca multidisciplinare con analisi di resti Archeobotanici per la Ricostruzione ambientale, climatica, filogeografica e virtuale). The project aims at the reconstruction of the cultural landscape as it was shaped through time by the interaction of climatic-environmental conditions. The area of investigation covers three circum-Mediterranean countries (Italy: Veneto, Emilia Romagna, Latium and Lucania; Turkey, and Libya). Several archaeological sites are studied through the most effective archaeobotanical tools for this kind of research, i.e. pollen and plant macroremains, integrating them systematically with non pollen palynomorphs (NPP), isotopic analyses, and ancient DNA (aDNA) extraction from sub-fossil plant materials. A parallel study on the genetic variability of living plants, aiming at furthering out our knowledge of wild or cultivated species of remarkable human interest, such as vine, olive and wild cereals, is planned. A few plant elements are particularly important (e.g., Olea europaea and Pinus halepensis, the former for its cultural/cultivation value, the latter for its importance as a landscape element) and it appears worth to focus on one of them at least. The use of archaeobotanical analyses ‘sensu lato', i.e., the study of plant remains from a site through the simultaneous measurements of the biological parameters above mentioned, is still underexploited. PICAR wants, in this way, to explore the new cognitive potentialities of the archaeobotanical method which, by definition, ‘investigates the relationship man- plant' through the analysis of the plant remains recovered from archaeological layers or, anyway, from layers coeval to the human occupation of a territory. The integrated research has already given impressive results from a number of sites, and is visible in the web site of the project (www.picar.org).