I am an archaeobotanist, employing botanical methods to answer archaeological questions about past subsistence and domestication processes. In 2021 I obtained a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships on the VITALY project (No. 101019563) to be developed at ISEM.
The project VITALY, deals with one of the big knowledge gaps in prehistory in Italy regarding the evidence of grape domestication. The main objectives are to investigate the beginning of viticulture in Italy and to determine the time of adoption of winemaking. The investigation will be applied to
archaeological Italian sites and will cover an extensive chronology: between the 6th and the 1st millennium BC. The challenge of the work is to obtain archaeological visibility of the grape domestication process and adoption of winemaking through an interdisciplinary approach that combines morphometric analysis of archaeological grape seeds by computer vision technique, charcoal analyses and chemical analysis of ancient organic residues trapped in archaeological materials.