About the conference

After the 18th Conference of the International Work Group for Palaeoethnobotany (IWGP) in Lecce in 2019 the IWGP Committee entrusted Jihočeská univerzita v Českých Budějovicích (the University of South Bohemia, USB) with the organisation of the 19th conference, the Czech side took on this task with great pleasure. Starting with the first conference in 1968 as a small group of leading European archaeobotanists and organised at the castle of Kačina in former Czechoslovakia under the name of the Internationale Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Paläoethnobotanik by one of its founders, Zdeněk Tempír, it has now returned after 54 years to the territory of present day Czechia. For this occasion of holding the conference in the country of its origin, the history of and the present Czech research in archaeobotany have been considered in detail. This resulted in a book, which was published during the IWGP conference (Beneš et al. 2022a) held from 13th to 17th June 2022 at the Clarion Congress Centre in České Budějovice. The main organiser was the University of South Bohemia (USB), namely the Faculty of Science in cooperation with the Faculty of Arts, and the organisational work was largely done by the Laboratory of Archaeobotany and Palaeoecology. This unit has a 20 years history and is now the largest archaeobotany unit in the Czech Republic (Bernardová et al. 2012; Beneš et al. 2023). The conference was co-organised by the Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, in Prague, the leading Czech archaeological institution that also employs several archaeobotanists as well as other specialists in environmental archaeology. The conference was generously supported by the City of České Budějovice. We are also very grateful to C-IN for the technical and administrative management of the conference.

To prepare for the conference and set the agenda, a scientific committee was appointed well in advance, whose members represented not only broadly multidisciplinary archaeobotany but also palaeoecology. This committee included mainly colleagues from the wider central European region, supplemented by some leading experts working in the field of global archaeobotany, and also members of the emerging generation of researchers. The committee, consisting of Jaromír Beneš, Dorian Fuller, Radoslaw Grabowski, Mária Hajnalová, Andreas Heiss, Sabine Karg, Jan Kolář, Anna Maria Mercuri, Welmoed Out, Leonor Peña-Chocarro, Adéla Pokorná, Petr Pokorný, Peter Poschlod, Michaela Ptáková, Manfred Rösch, Laura Sadori, Robert Spengler and Chris Stevens, met regularly (online) for more than a year and set firm rules for the two-stage evaluation of abstracts. We would like to thank them all for this challenging work.

The committee also defined the main themes of the conference. Theme 1, “Archaeobotany and ethnobotany as explanatory tools in an archaeological record”, included a contemporary and attractive theme of global archaeobotany closely related to any part of archaeological research. Theme 2, “Origins and expansion of cultivated plants”, represented a traditional subject of IWGP conferences, and therefore well covered at České Budějovice. Theme 3, “Landscape change and human transformation of ecosystems”, attempted to map the broader impact of archaeobotany on the understanding of past and present ecosystems, particularly when it is included within broader interdisciplinary landscape studies. Each of these themes comprised additional topics, which can be found in the conference abstract book (Beneš et al. 2022b, https://archaeobotany.org/event/iwgp-2022/).

A total of 263 participants attended the conference, presenting exciting results in 96 oral contributions and an impressive number of 150 posters (Fig. 1). The different sessions were spread across five conference days and 18 distinct time slots to minimize parallel sessions. This schedule included sessions dedicated to macro- and microremains, a round table discussion on the dissemination of archaeobotany and an engaging weed ecology workshop led by Amy Bogaard, Mike Charles, Elizabeth Stroud and Alex Weide, in collaboration with John Hodgson and Glynis Jones.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Participants of the 19th International Work Group for Palaeoethnobotany in front of the Clarion Congress Hotel. Photo by Kamila Horáková

Full size image

The venue of the welcome reception, sponsored by the world-famous Budweiser Budvar brewery, took place in the courtyard of the historic town hall, where the conference participants were welcomed by the Mayor of České Budějovice. Archaeobotanists from 37 countries enjoyed several social events on the university campus, where they listened to an exciting musical production by the USB Faculty of Science band ŠUKAS, and later to the mysterious folk-jazz band Orchestrion. During the conference dinner, the participants experienced traditional South Bohemian cuisine and local craft beers in the Kněžínek country restaurant. Two excursions on the last day of the conference took 70 participants to the beautiful countryside around the town of Třeboň, and also to see the historic town of Český Krumlov.

About the volume

For the present issue, 19 papers were submitted of which 17 were accepted for publication after peer reviewing. The Original Articles can be divided into methodological contributions on biometric and morphometric modelling (Tarongi et al.) and phytosociological analyses (Brinkkemper et al.). These are followed by a paper presenting a combined approach integrating written sources and ethnobotany to study the domestication of Brassica rapa (Šamajová et al.). Prehistoric plant use and economy are then the subjects of several articles dealing with the Neolithic and Chalcolithic (Vandorpe et al.; Moskal-del Hoyo et al.; Sabanov et al.; Kirleis et al.), and the Iron Age (Stika et al.) in Europe. These are followed by contributions dedicated to the Predynastic and Early Dynastic plant economy in the Nile Delta (Marinova et al.) and an assemblage of macrobotanical remains and pollen from an imperial period garden in Rome (Masi et al.). The following contributions deal with less common types of plant preservation. While Hristová et al. discuss the potential of plant remains preserved in burial contexts by corrosion products of metals, Castillón et al. report on plant remains recovered from earthen architectures in Argentina. Two articles are about medieval and post-medieval sites, on the evidence of food (Sabato et al.), and also on the role of fire in the landscape (Saeidi et al.).

Three Review Articles give overviews of the use of woodlands for wild resources during the last 2,000 years in southern Chile (Roa Solís and Capparelli), the Neolithisation process in the central Mediterranean (Speciale), and the history of Triticum timopheevii s.l. in southern and eastern Europe (Filipovic et al.).