The Demeter project: eight millennia of agrobiodiversity changes in the northwest Mediterranean basin

Abstract

International audienceThe development of agricultural societies is closely entangled with that of domestic animals and plants. Local and traditional domestic breeds and varieties are the result of millennia of selec- tion by farmers. DEMETER (2020-2025) is an international pro- ject which is aiming to characterize the changes in animal and plant agrobiodiversity (pigs, sheep, goats, and barley) in relation with environmental and socioeconomic factors in the northwes- tern Mediterranean basin since the beginnings of agriculture. The project is based on a combination of approaches including phe- nomics (through geometric morphometrics), databasing, zooar- chaeology, archaeobotany, climate modeling, paleoproteins (ZooMs) and statistical analyses. Several hundreds of archaeo- logical sites from the South of France and Catalonia will be stu- died, covering the maximum environmental, societal and cultural diversity of context over the course of the last eight millennia