Résumé
The history of rye (Secale spp.) remains enigmatic, as numerous studies have been unable to provide a straightforward view of its characteristics and trajectory across western Eurasia. This is largely due to the limited archaeobotanical record, together with the well-known difficulties in distinguishing between different rye species and forms based on grain morphology. At the same time, this challenge presents a fundamental opportunity to gain a wider comprehension of rye’s role in past agriculture, and to deepen our understanding into the fascinating process of plant domestication and its continuum. With the aim of filling this research gap in southwestern Europe, a new project - RYSE « From weed to crop? The evolutionary journey of rye in southwestern Europe - was established through a collaboration between two teams from ISEM (DBA) and CIBIO (ENVARCH), within the scope of the BIOPOLIS Teaming project. Itencompasses different lines of work, including geometric morphometrics, experimental carbonisation, and radiocarbon dating, with the first playing a key role. Thus, outline shape and size analyses will be carried out on rye grains recovered from archaeological sites located in Portugal, Spain, and southern France, with chronologies dating up to the Late Medieval period. These will be compared with uncharred and experimentally charred modern material from wild and weedy rye, as well as from multiple current cultivars.The information obtained will be contextualized within the broader framework of available archaeobotanical data and the cultural, economic, and sociopolitical backgrounds of the regions under study. New AMS radiocarbon dates will help refine the chronological framework of rye. Thus, through this presentation, we aim to introduce the RYSE project, present its main features and goals, describe the methodologies employed, and share the first results from the initial analyses.