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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - RAINDROPS (Resilience and Adaptation in Drylands. Identifying past water management practices for drought-resistant crops)

Teaser

Summary

Today, drylands cover over 40% of the Earthâ€™s surface and are home to approximately 2.3 billion people. RAINDROPS aims to provide a long-term perspective on human adaptation to and the establishment of resilient cultivation systems in drylands. In arid areas, either irrigation, a permanent water source or some form of rainwater harvesting techniques are often deemed necessary for cultivation. However, there are modern examples that testify to the existence of successful rain-fed cultivation systems, even in hyper-arid locations. Archeologically, the different levels of water management, and especially rain-fed cultivation, are extremely difficult to study, due to the lack of trustful proxies of these practices. Determining water availability directly from archaeobotanical material â€“ specifically form ubiquitous and well-preserved micro-remains (phytoliths) â€“ offers a potential solution to this problem.
The main objectives of RAINDROPS are: 1) to develop cutting-edge methodology for identifying direct evidence of water management practice from crop remains; 2) to identify strong adaptive practices in drylands cultivation, with particular emphasis on rain-fed agriculture and drought resistant crops (i.e. finger millet and sorghum); and, 3) to establish past water management and land use practices at three biophysical hotspots in Asia and Africa. RAINDROPS combines ground-breaking research on plant physiology with original archaeobotanical applications and records of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) on cultivation systems in drylands to deliver an innovative and reliable methodology to understand past water management practices. Plant remains from archaeological sites are the most direct evidence of ancient cultivation practices. RAINDROPS connects experimentally controlled data of macro-remains (stable carbon isotopes) and micro-remains (phytolith morphological ratios, and stable oxygen and silicon isotopes from phytoliths), with ethnographic evidence to create a methodological framework for the assessment of crop water availability. This approach is developed for three of the major tropical and sub-tropical crops, both in prehistory and today â€“ pearl millet [Pennisetum glaucum (L.) R. Br.], finger millet [Eleusine coracana (L.) Gaertn.] and sorghum [Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench] â€“ and is applied to selected key archaeological settings (Harappa, Pakistan; Al Khiday, Sudan and Mezber, Ethiopia).

Work performed

During the first 18 months of the project the work has concentrated on experimental cultivation (WP2), Ethnoarchaeology (WP3) and partially on archaeology (WP5).
Experimental cultivation was carried out at ICRISAT (Patancheru, Hyderabad, Telangana, India). There, Francesca Dâ€™Agostini (PhD student with the project) performed controlled growth of selected landraces within lysimeters (plastic cylinders that contained each a single plant) under a rainout shelter. This allowed her to fully control the watering conditions of the plants that were grown under different watering regimes in order to simulate the different growing conditions that can be associated to different water management strategies. During the growth she was able to obtain several data regarding the plants transpiration rate and their responses to water treatment and she will be able to connect these to the results of the analysis on seeds and phytoliths that she will extract from the same plants. This will give us an idea of the importance of the genetic factor in the plants response to water treatment for the proxies under study.
Parallel to the experimental work, ethnographical interviews with local farmers have been conducted in Pakistan and Ethiopia. In Pakistan we visited an area in Sindh, close to the Khirtar mountain range, where farmer cultivate sorghum without irrigation. In Ethiopia, Abel Ruiz Giralt â€“another PhD students with the project- had worked with sorghum and finger millet farmers in Tigray. Bothe ethnographic works have highlighted similarities in the decision-making processes that these farmers apply when dealing with scarce and unpredictable rainfall, as well as specific adaptations characteristic of the different areas. The information collected during these interviews are now being processed for their statistical treatment in order to integrate them in the general model that will be used to interpret past evidences from archaeobotanical remains.
While in Ethiopia, we took part in the excavations at Ona Adi that, together with Mezber, will be the focus of the archaeological investigations for the Ethiopian case study (WP5), where we collected sediment samples for phytolith extraction, both form archaeological features as well as tools such as grinding stones and pottery. We also discussed with the people responsible for flotation (the recovery of carbonised macro remains such as seeds and grains) our interest in analyse stable isotopes signatures of any millet grain that they will identify during laboratory analyses.

Final results

Pre-industrial agriculture in drylands tends to be considered a secondary activity, only possible where constant and secure sources of water are present. However, it is clear that past human groups experimented with a diverse assemblage of crops, some of which are well adapted to areas with water constrains (e.g. millets). These crops constitute today some of the most important sources for future biodiverse and sustainable agriculture in many parts of the world. Dryland agriculture is becoming one of the main concerns in development studies due to the impact of desertification on food security for a great part of the human population and while the potential of archaeology to inform long-term human adaptation strategies is clearly recognised, archaeobotanical studies have been less used to inform on modern issues.
RAINDROPS is the first research projects that unites crop physiology, traditional ecological knowledge and archaeobotanical research on a wide scale for the study of drylands crops in a long-term perspective. Working with institutions such as the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and the Tigray Agricultural Research Institute (TARI), will allow for the project results to be included in the forefront of the research on dryland crops and can potentially influence some of the policies on sustainable development in drylands. In specific, while ICRISAT is an international-renown institute, the TARI is a local entity focussed on fostering knowledge and use of local traditional crops. This collaboration may lead to the development of socially and environmentally sustainable cultivation in the area, with a direct and immediate return on the local population. The work so far conducted on the use of local crop, both through the use of published maps and data and in the field, has highlighted the presence on the territory of a variety of cultivations that are not reported in the official maps of landuse (e.g. Harvest Choice or FAO). Indeed, work on the field has evidenced the presence of local cultivation practices even in areas that are considered as inactive â€“devoid of cultivations- or dedicate to monocropping while in reality there are several different crops cultivated together.
Removing current observational biases on present and past agricultural practices in drylands, RAINDROPS will potentially revolutionise our understanding of past human-water relationship and human livelihoods in drylands and deserts.