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Contribution of GMM to track domesticaiton process

A paper recently published in PlosOne showed the potential of GMM to address questions about poppy domestication, based on waterlogged archaeological poppy seeds. These seeds are the most direct and common evidence found on archaeological sites, unlike the capsules, which are rarely recovered. Seeds are therefore probably the only archaeological tool that can provide substantial, diachronic and geographically broad information on the domestication/cultivation process.

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The “joy plant”, a persistant factoïd

In spite of the doubt argued and presented since the mid-1970s, then 80’s, and even more recently, the idea that the poppy was widely used in the Mesopotamian world is still tenacious.

The opium poppy is of interest to several disciplines (medical, anthropology, geopolitics, etc.) and more particularly its use in medicinal or ritual recipes, since the ancient period in the Near East and in the Mediterranean area. It is precisely to illustrate the thousand-year-old narcotic use of the opium poppy that a factoid is still used today in scientific literature.

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Opium Poppy

This Carnet aims to present the results of an ongoing research around the origin of the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum L.).

This project began in 2018 with the obtaining of funding from the Fyssen Foundation (coord. A. Salavert, MNHN) and the Agrichange project (coord. F. Antolin, univ. Basel) has laid the foundation for a long-term collaborative project. Two grants have been obtained in 2022, ANR JCJC Poppy (France) and FTC DOPE (Portugal) to pursue this research. The project is based on archaeological material, as well as on a sampling of modern and historical biodiversity conserved in seed banks and herbaria. It uses multidisciplinary analyses – archaeobotany, dating techniques, genomics, geometric morphometrics (GMM), spatial analyses.