Emergence and evolution of ancient agroecosystems in Greater Iran: Biodiversity, impact and legacy In the framework of an international research project entitled KHARMAN (‘harvest’ in Persian) we will aim at reconstructing past human-plant and animal interactions in the area of Greater Iran. Our approach is based on archaeozoological and achaeobotanical research applied in a diachronic perspective from the Late Pleistocene until modern times. Three themes are concerned: reconstruction of wild and domesticated biodiversity; understanding how agroecosystems adapted to environmental and climatic conditions; evaluation of the impact of agropastoral activities on the environment. The French bio-archaeological community, namely archaeozoologists and archaoebotanists, has stood out during the last decades as one of the main partners of national archaeologies in Iran and adjacent countries. This status has been achieved by long term efforts and a continuous presence in the field during the last two decades and expressed by 1) a wide communication with the Iranian and adjacent areas scholars and institutions of various fields of research (archaeology, botany, zoology, environmental studies, ethnography, history); 2) a continuous expertise of bio-archaeological material; 3) the creation of an archaeozoological laboratory and the training of Iranian and French students. Besides maintaining the leading role of French scholars in this domain, we wish to associate our colleagues in an ambitious program combining scientific research, expertise and higher education. The detailed proposition submitted here aims at preparing, together with European and Asian colleagues, a large-scale scientific project that can be submitted, within two or three years, to an international funding scheme (ERC, ANR or others). Such a funding scheme will allow us to gather the leading scientific community, establish common research strategies and consolidate already obtained data by the creation of a bio-archaeological database of the Iranian domain and adjacent areas. The precise actions that are to be undertaken during the next 24 months will thus be 1) the constitution of the scientific network through our existing or blooming collaborations in Europe and in Asia in order to define the outlines and the agenda for the future collaborative research, 2) The constitution of the database as a fundamental action and as start-up project 3) The technical preparation of future research.

The POPPY project aims to determine the origin and early diffusion of the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum L.). Opium poppy could be the sole plant domesticated during the Neolithic period in Europe, at least from the middle of the sixth millennium. The main objectives of the project are to 1) identify the geographical origin(s) of poppy including the location(s) of its wild progenitor(s) and of its domestication, 2) define a chrono-cultural framework for its early domestication process and dispersal from Prehistory to the end of the Iron Age (6000-50 cal BC). The POPPY project is based on archaeological material, as well as sampling of modern and historical biodiversity kept in seed banks and herbaria. It implements multidisciplinary analyses – archaeobotany, dating techniques, genomics, geometric morphometrics (GMM), spatial analyses – to elucidate the role of the opium poppy in Europe’s natural and cultural heritage. The project (42 months) is structured around three complementary tasks. Task 1 will build a database that integrate an exhaustive review of archaeological records to reveal the trajectories and the chrono-cultural framework of poppy dispersal from the Early Neolithic (6000 cal BC) to the end of the Iron Age (50 cal BC). Based on an already validated methodology carried out in the frame of previous one-year project (Fondation Fyssen, 2018), this task will also produce a new series of radiocarbon dating directly performed on poppy remains at key sites located in Europe (from the Balkans to the British Isles), North Africa (Maghreb and Egypt) and the Near-East. It will confirm and track precisely the early dispersal of the plant. These results will be integrated and compared to the general radiocarbon framework provided by other materials (cereals, bones, wood, artefacts) on sites inventoried in the archaeological database. Task 2 will consist in a co-analysis of the genetic and morphometric diversity (regional and varietal) of a common set of modern poppy and herbarium samples. The use of molecular markers such as SNPs in modern and sub-modern (herbaria) landraces of Papaver spp. will identify its wild progenitor(s) as well as trace the genetic markers of the early geographical dispersal of the plant. The genetic characterisation of the herbaria samples considered as reservoirs of ancient DNA (aDNA) constitute a pioneer research in prevision of future application on archaeological material. The GMM will allow to analyse the morphometric diversity within and among the modern samples and, more especially, to distinguish wild and cultivated subspecies based on the size/shape differences of their seeds and on the number of cells on their testa (seed coat). The methodology has been tested and validated on a small set of poppy seeds in the frame of the AgriChange project (SNSF, 2018-2021). The production of this solid modern reference database will open the way to future application of GMM on archaeological material to track the start of opium poppy cultivation. Task 3 will propose an interdisciplinary interpretation of the spatial analysis of the archaeobotanical database (Task 1) and the genetic/GMM database (Task 2) through inclusive visual restitutions, and taking into account multi-source variables with the Geographic Information System (GIS) tool. By testing the interdisciplinary integrative potential and the analytical geostatistical possibilities offered by the GIS tools,Task 3 could give solid bases for a future modelling of the opium poppy’s history. The POPPY project will initiate new and long-term collaborations with junior and senior researchers in France and in Europe. It will pave the way for systemic and cross-cultural approaches to the history of opium poppy. A significant attention will be made throughout the POPPY project duration and beyond to disseminate an up-to-date knowledge about opium poppy and the research methodologies.

Zooarchaelogists have been trying for a long time to document the early step of animal domestication in the archaeological record but this has been proven a difficult task. Zooarchaeologists use morphological markers based on experiments focused on behavioural selection that led to the genetic divergence of the domestic stock. However, during the very first steps of the domestication process, it is unlikely that such processes already acted to build an observable phenotypic divergence. Another, most often neglected process may nevertheless have played a role in these early steps of domestication: namely plastic, non heritable phenotypic modifications due to changes in life style. How this kind of early response to domestication may have play a role in favouring, and possibly orienting the later genetic differentiation of domestic stocks, is an important issue for both understanding the pace and processes of the domestication process in ancient societies and the evolutionary role of plasticity. The geometry and inner architecture of limb bones will reflect the biomechanical changes in loading regimes associated with changes in lifestyle and physical activities. Therefore, the reduction of mobility associated with captivity at the onset of domestication should be detectable in the animal bone micro and macrostructure and used as proxy for the early stage of the domestication that can be traced in the archaeological record. Biomechanical analysis has been widely used in the field of physical anthropology to assess the lifestyle of past population but theses have rarely and only partially been investigated with respect to animal domestication. With the rapid advances in high resolution 3D images acquisition, and morphometric techniques to analyse these 3D objects, time has come for zooarchaeology to pursue this promising research avenue in order to identify new anatomical indicators of human control over animals directly applicable to its biological archives. To investigate the biomechanical consequences on internal and external structure of the skeleton imposed by the captive environment, DOMEXP will use an experimental approach through the creation of the first wild boar (Sus scrofa) farm experiment dedicated to the simulation of the domestication process. Using different experimental treatments and functional constraints (free range, outdoor limited mobility and indoor reduced mobility) morphometric investigation will rely on skeleton markers apt to investigate functional changes caused by a reduction in mobility: limb long bones (femur, tibia, humerus), and tarsal bones (calacaneus, talus), both strongly involved in locomotion and often found complete in archaeological record. The muscular and skeleton changes during the growth of the animals will be captured with in vivo longitudinal 3D CT and MRI scans. The latest advances in 3D biomechanical and geometric morphometric analysis will then capture and decode the signature of lifestyle variation imprinted in the external and internal structural morphology. The experimental characterization of this phenotypic signature will then be used as proxy to infer the life style/behaviour of Neolithic series of Sus scrofa. This research action will rely on a real multidisciplinary interaction between fields of functional ecology, evolutionary biology, functional skeletal anatomy, and bioarchaology to achieve an original approach towards a better understanding of the early steps of domestication. The results will also contribute to ongoing discussions about the role of developmental plasticity in the evolution of new phenotypes and will provide unique insights into the cause, pace and amount of phenotypic variation that can be achieved when facing radically new environmental conditions.

The PaleoCet project will analyze the exploitation of whales by Paleolithic foragers in Europe by focusing on a key case: the northern Atlantic shore around the Gulf of Biscay during the Magdalenian, ca. 19-14 cal ka BP. This archeological context yielded the richest and most diverse evidence of seashore exploitation in the European Paleolithic, including the oldest evidence of a regular exploitation of whales known in human history: unworked whale bones, worked whale teeth, and, especially, over 100 objects carved out of whale bone. We will test the hypothesis that these large cetaceans as a means of subsistence were a major incentive for the development of true coastal economies, which are evidenced clearly for the first time in Europe at this period. This project will thus improve our understanding of the early human exploitation of the seashore and adaptation to marine resources, a central issue in current prehistoric anthropology because of its deep impact on human evolution. Three obstacles limit our knowledge of the exploitation of whales in the Magdalenian: almost all the whale bones from that period are unidentified at species level, few of them are precisely dated, and the presence of whale-bone objects was not investigated outside the Pyrenees. To lift these barriers, the Magdalenian record of whale remains will be completed through a survey of collections from Cantabrian Spain, a region rich in sites close to the Magdalenian shoreline but where whale-bone objects have not yet been searched for. Simultaneously, the available record will be analyzed with two cutting-edge methods, recently developed and applied for the first time to this material: ZooMS, and 14C dating with ECHoMICADAS. Collagen peptide mass fingerprinting (aka "ZooMS") is a rapid and cost-effective approach for taxonomic identification to species level with minimal sampling. It will be done on a systematic basis in order to confirm the macroscopic identification as whale bone, and to know which whale species were present in the Gulf of Biscay and available to Paleolithic people. This is fundamental for understanding the range of possible interactions between foragers and whales (mere scavenging or opportunistic killing?), since whale species vary a lot in their ecology and thus in how accessible they are to humans. Radiocarbon dating with ECHoMICADAS is an AMS dating technology that makes it possible to decrease sample sizes to a tenth of traditional AMS dating, hence enabling the 14C dating of objects with high heritage value. It will be done on one part of the whale-bone objects to precise the chronology of whale bone carving and to assess if any chronological trend appears in whale exploitation within the Magdalenian, in the range of species exploited and in types of use. One part of the 14C program will be devoted to the precise quantification of the marine reservoir effect in this context. The results of this project, including a photogrammetric survey of all objects, will be archived in a public database and disseminated through scientific communication media. But since these results are also likely to arise public interest, a particular attention will be paid to their communication towards the general public, notably through several public events. Reconstructing the prehistory of whale exploitation is challenging because most prehistoric coastal sites have been lost to marine transgressions. This project confronts this problem by building up on recent scientific achievements and cutting-edge technologies, and bringing them to a higher degree of synergy. The results will also have implications for the study of past cetacean ecology: by documenting the whale taxa in the North Atlantic ca. 19-14 cal ka BP, this project will improve our knowledge of the evolution of cetacean populations and contribute to public awareness about the magnitude of environmental change, anthropic exploitation and loss of biodiversity since that period.

Anthracology is a robust method of studying forest stands and their transformation as a result of climatic changes or human practices, but also the uses of wood as fuel and material. This method is based on the botanical identification of wood and charcoal preserved in archaeological sites. It is based on a visual or morphometric reading, under microscopy, of the anatomical structure of the wood, preserved thanks to carbonisation. The transfer towards archaeological interpretations releaqse on the ability of the researchers to identify the taxa. While the expertise of the specialist is effective for the identification of a majority of taxa, the anatomical proximity of certain species remains a lock to the identification of other taxa with high information value. Using the latest advances and developments in AI research, and new developments, the objective of the project is to propose, via learning models, a decision support tool for the identification of taxa for which conventional methods are inoperative, even though the archaeological and paleo-environmental issues associated with their identification are numerous. By allowing the identification of key taxa, the project will provide new information on the evolution of forest stands and their uses, from the Palaeolithic to the sub-current. At the end of the project, a free labelled image database and an interoperable interface will be made available to the wood science community . It could also be used in industry for species recognition.