Exploring human-plant interactions in central Italy over the centuries: Compiling and comparing published and unpublished archaeobotanical records

The gradual implementation of archaeobotany in archaeological excavations in the Italian territory in last decades has greatly helped to gain knowledge about past human-plant interactions. Information is now available, among others, about diet, selection of natural resources, introduced taxa, and ritual uses of plants. However, archaeobotanical studies continue to be published in different types of sources, such as scientific articles and archaeological reports, the latter of which are often complex to retrieve. Furthermore, data often concern single contexts or sites, making it hard to piece the puzzle together. A noteworthy step to obtain an overall picture of human plant interactions in Italy is represented, since 2015, by BRAIN (Botanical Record of Archaeobotany Italian Network), a cooperative network and database listing all the sites, their locations, chronology, cultures, archaeological contexts, and various types of archaeobotanical studies conducted, along with their bibliographic references. The database is periodically updated with new publications. In this study, produced within the PNRR PE5 CHANGES Spoke 8 and CN5 NBFC Spoke 3, we present a georeferenced tool to compare data about plant macro-remains extracted from publications present in BRAIN and deriving from unpublished studies, homogenizing them, and sorting them by periods. The project now covers central Italy and will gradually be implemented to include the rest of the country. Through the implementation of the developed protocol, the reconstruction of dietary preferences and the introduction of new plants from the Neolithic to the modern-day will be more accessible and straightforward. It will thus be possible, for example, to better trace the arrival and spread of archaeophytes and neophytes in the Italian Peninsula.