A new way of seeing pulses: preliminary results of geometric morphometric analyses of Iron Age seeds from the site of La
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
A new way of seeing pulses: preliminary results of geometric morphometric analyses of Iron Age seeds from the site of La Font de la Canya (Barcelona, Spain) Miguel Tarongi1 · Vincent Bonhomme2 · Allowen Evin2 · Sarah Ivorra2 · Dani López3 · Natàlia Alonso1 · Laurent Bouby2 Received: 17 December 2019 / Accepted: 30 September 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This study applied size and shape analyses through traditional and geometric morphometrics to quantify the differences between three taxa: Lathyrus sativus (grass pea), Lens culinaris (lentil) and Vicia faba (broad bean). This analysis represents a pilot study in view of a wider future application of this technique to identify the role of legumes throughout the Western Mediterranean in the Bronze and Iron Ages. Here, we quantify the morphological differences of seed species from the site of La Font de la Canya (Catalonia, Spain), an Iron Age (625–150 bc) centre of storage and trade which delivered a vast assemblage of cereal, fruit and legume remains. Our results reveal that seed outline analyses have a greater potential of prediction than length measurements. The combination of the two, however, leads to even more precise predictions. Moreover, the quantitative differences between the lentils of the different samples confirm the potential of these analyses to further identify intra-species morphotypes. Keywords Legumes · Seed outline · Distance measurements · Lens culinaris · Lathyrus sativus · Vicia faba
Introduction Along with cereals, legumes are one of the most important resources for human consumption due both to their large number of cultivated species and their nutritional properties. The domestication of the first cereals and legumes took place simultaneously during the Preceramic Neolithic Communicated by M. Primavera. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-020-00801-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Miguel Tarongi [email protected] 1
GIP, 3DPatrimoni, Departament d’Història, Fac. de Lletres, INDEST, Universitat de Lleida, Pl. Victor Siurana, 1, 25003 Lleida, Catalonia, Spain
2
ISEM ‑ UMR 5554, Université Montpellier C/C 065, CNRS, EPHE, IRD, Place Eugène Bataillon, 34095 Montpellier Cedex 05, France
3
ArqueoVitis Sccl, Camí de Sant Pere d’Avinyó, s/n 08973 Avinyonet del Penedès, Barcelona, Spain
(9000–8000 cal bc) of Southwest Asia (Zohary and Hopf 1973; Zohary et al. 2012). Kislev and Bar-Yosef (1988) suggested that legumes were cultivated even earlier, as the processes for their preparation for consumption is straightforward, contrary to cereals. Ethnographic and archaeological data nonetheless reveal that legumes were always secondary to cereals throughout the Mediterranean Basin. This could explain why they have been relegated in archaeobotanical literature to a secondary role behind cereals (Tarongi et al. 2020). The earliest cultivation of legumes in
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