A study of grape seeds from the Middle Bronze Age, conducted by Italian, French, and British researchers, provides unprecedented information about the origins of domesticated vines and viticulture in Southern Italy. Published in the journal Scientific Reports, the study demonstrates the exploitation of domesticated vines well before Greek colonization. The findings converge to reveal an introduction from the Eastern Mediterranean around 1450-1200 BCE, highlighting a complex process at the roots of the region’s first viticulture.
The pivotal role of wine in the economic and cultural relationships of ancient Mediterranean societies, along with the significance of vines in landscapes and agricultural systems, is well-established. However, tracing the origins of this situation is challenging due to the absence of texts and conspicuous archaeological evidence typical of mass ancient viticulture (wine cellars, presses, etc.). While wild vines were present across Europe and the Mediterranean, genetic data suggests that vines were domesticated somewhere in the East Mediterranean and gradually spread westward with viticulture. Yet, understanding the potentially complex events of vine domestication, diffusion, and possible interactions with local wild vines offers few handles for archaeology.
Archaeobotany plays a central role here. The methods of geometric morphometrics and paleogenomics, applied to archaeological grape seeds today, help distinguish domesticated and wild vines and explore the characteristics of ancient domesticated vines by comparing them with known modern varieties. Having excellent preservation conditions for archaeological seeds is crucial for implementing these approaches, and wet environments provide the most favorable context. Unlike carbonized specimens found at most sites, water-soaked seeds allow the preservation of ancient DNA, and their shape, unaltered by carbonization, enables a more direct application of geometric morphometrics.
The cave of Pertosa-Auletta, located in Campania, Southern Italy, offers such exceptional conditions, unique for a Bronze Age site in the Mediterranean region, allowing the preservation of water-soaked macrobotanical remains. The combination of geometric morphometrics and paleogenomics for sample analysis, still exceptional in archaeobotany, opens a unique window into vine exploitation in the second half of the 2nd millennium (1450-1200 BCE according to radiocarbon dating). The morphology of 55 archaeological grape seeds could be described by geometric morphometrics, and 5 specimens contained a sufficient quantity and quality of endogenous ancient DNA to be compared with modern genetic reference sequences. Both approaches converge to demonstrate that domesticated vines were used by local populations as early as this ancient period.
Geometric morphometrics and paleogenomics lead to a more precise characterization of ancient domesticated vines as resembling current wine-making grape varieties, originating from the East, especially the Balkans. These results provide the first direct indication of the introduction of domesticated vines to Italy from the Eastern Mediterranean. The connection can be made with commercial and cultural contacts established from 1700 BCE between Southern Italy and the Mycenaeans from the Aegean region, where vines were clearly cultivated at that time. It is currently impossible to specify whether the introduced vines had been domesticated in the Aegean or if the Greeks themselves inherited them from more eastern regions.
However, the results obtained reveal that the birth of viticulture in the Western Mediterranean involved more complex mechanisms than simple diffusion under economic and cultural influence. The occupants of Pertosa continued to use wild vines, likely local, in association with introduced domestic forms. The paleogenomic profile of one of the seeds even testifies to hybridization between wild and imported domesticated vines. All of this suggests that Bronze Age viticulturists cultivated a mix of fully domesticated introduced vines and local wild vines. Such practices, if they also occurred elsewhere in the Mediterranean, may have contributed to determining a gradual, irregular, and variable domestication process, rather than a rapid phenomenon corresponding to the simple diffusion of a uniform domestic type.
