Wallace, M. orcid.org/0000-0002-2355-5565, Bonhomme, V., Russell, J. et al. (8 more authors) (2019) Searching for the origins of bere barley: a geometric morphometric approach to cereal landrace recognition in archaeology. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 26 (3). pp. 1125-1142. ISSN 1072-5369
Abstract
Bere is a landrace of barley, adapted to the marginal conditions of northern Scotland, especially those of the Northern and Western Isles. The history of bere on these islands is long and, in an era of diminishing landrace cultivation, bere now represents one of the oldest cereal landraces in Europe still grown commercially. The longevity of bere raises the possibility of using grain characteristics of present-day specimens to identify bere in the archaeological record. Geometric modern morphometric (GMM) analysis of grains from bere and other barley landraces is conducted to determine whether landraces can be differentiated on grain morphology. Results indicate that there are morphological differences between bere and other British and Scandinavian landraces, and between bere from Orkney and the Western Isles, both of which are apparent in genetic analysis. This finding paves the way for the identification of bere archaeologically, helping to establish its status as living heritage and securing its commercial future. More broadly, this work indicates the potential of grain GMM for the recognition of cereal landraces, permitting the ancestry and exchange of landraces to be traced in the archaeological record.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2018. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. |
Keywords: | Barley; Cereals; Landraces; Archaeology; Archaeobotany; Agriculture; Genetics; Geometric morphometrics |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > Department of Archaeology (Sheffield) The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > School of Mathematics and Statistics (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 06 Mar 2019 14:48 |
Last Modified: | 03 Dec 2019 11:35 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Verlag (Germany) |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s10816-018-9402-2 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:141221 |
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Filename: Wallace2018_Article_SearchingForTheOriginsOfBereBa.pdf
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