Network


Latest external collaboration on country level. Dive into details by clicking on the dots.

Hotspot


Dive into the research topics where Luc Vrydaghs is active.

Publication


Featured researches published by Luc Vrydaghs.


Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America | 2011

Multidisciplinary perspectives on banana (Musa spp.) domestication

Xavier Perrier; Edmond De Langhe; Mark Donohue; Carol Lentfer; Luc Vrydaghs; Frédéric Bakry; Françoise Carreel; Isabelle Hippolyte; Jean-Pierre Horry; Christophe Jenny; Vincent Lebot; Ange-Marie Risterucci; Kodjo Tomekpé; Hugues Doutrelepont; Terry Ball; Jason Manwaring; Pierre de Maret; Tim Denham

Original multidisciplinary research hereby clarifies the complex geodomestication pathways that generated the vast range of banana cultivars (cvs). Genetic analyses identify the wild ancestors of modern-day cvs and elucidate several key stages of domestication for different cv groups. Archaeology and linguistics shed light on the historical roles of people in the movement and cultivation of bananas from New Guinea to West Africa during the Holocene. The historical reconstruction of domestication processes is essential for breeding programs seeking to diversify and improve banana cvs for the future.


Vegetation History and Archaeobotany | 2001

First archaeological evidence of banana cultivation in central Africa during the third millennium before present

Christophe Mbida Mindzie; Hughes H. Doutrelepont; Luc Vrydaghs; Rony Swennen; Rudy Swennen; Hans Beeckman; Edmond De Langhe; Pierre de Maret

Abstract. Phytoliths recovered from refuse pits excavated in central Cameroon and dated to ca 2500 B.P. have been positively identified for the first time in Africa as derived from Musa the cultivated banana, after a comparative study of Musa and Ensete phytoliths. This discovery provides archaeologists with unequivocal proof of early agriculture in central Africa. Furthermore, the presence of banana in Cameroon much earlier than previously assumed could explain how agriculture spread through the rain forest. Lastly, as Musa is of Asian origin, this study provides the first concrete evidence of contacts across the Indian Ocean a millennium earlier than currently accepted.


Medieval and Modern Matters | 2011

Unravelling urban stratigraphy. The study of Brussels’ (Belgium) Dark Earth. An archaeopedological perspective

Yannick Devos; Luc Vrydaghs; Ann Degraeve; Sylvianne Modrie

Although thick, dark, humic, macroscopically homogeneous units, also known as Dark Earth, are an important part of the urban stratigraphy, their understanding often remains problematic. The aim of the present paper is to demonstrate how archaeopedology contributes to the study of such urban Dark Earth units. Through the example of Brussels’ Dark Earth, we demonstrate that their formation results from multiphased processes whereby various human actions interact with natural phenomena. The formation and transformation of Dark Earth can be understood as an ongoing process of accumulation, erosion, decomposition, homogenisation and other types of soil development that mainly stops once the Dark Earth gets sealed.Among the human activities crop cultivation, gardening, pasture, middening and quarrying have been identified. Main natural phenomena seem to be bioturbation, erosion, alluviation and colluviation.Taking into account that Dark Earth has a polygenetic history, it can be concluded that it should be inve...


Azania:archaeological Research in Africa | 2005

The initial history of bananas in Africa. A reply to Jan Vansina, Azania, 2003

C. Mbida; Hugues Doutrelepont; Luc Vrydaghs; Ro Swennen; Ru Swennen; H.Beeckman; E. De Langhe; P de Maret

The arrival of the first cultivated bananas in Africa has been a matter of speculation for over a century. While they necessarily would have come ‘from the East‘, the centre of Musa diversity stretches from New Guinea to India (Denham et ul. 2004), the timing of their introduction and the human agents responsible have never been determined with certainty. Three competing theories have been put forward to explain the introduction of bananas to Africa. First, bananas were introduced by the Portuguese during the 16th century, second, by Arab or Persian traders around the 8th century or earlier, or third, by the Austronesian-speakmg people who settled in Madagascar early in the first millennium AD, making possible a subsequent introduction to the continent. The third theory, advanced by the late Norman Simmonds (1962), an authority on bananas, has steadily been gaining ground. Common to all theories is the belief that bananas did not reach the African continent before the Christian Era (CE), i.e. before 2000 years ago. Recently, phytoliths from refuse pits excavated in central Cameroon were identified as coming from a cultivated banana after a comparative study of the genera Musd and Ensete (Mbida et al. 2000, 2001). They were dated c. 2500 Before Present (bp). If confirmed, this would shed a different light on the early evolution of agriculture in humid tropical Africa. For example, agriculture in the rainforest would not have relied on yam, which is generally not very productive in the absence of a dry season, but could have developed around plantains, which prefer such an environment. Such an early date for banana cultivation in Africa calls for critical examination of data and the broader argument. In a note published in the 2003 issue of Amnia, Jan Vansina expresses serious reservations about this finding (Vansina 2003). He writes, for example, “one can only accept that the earliest evidence in Africa for the cultivation of edible seedless bananas in Africa dates from the later sixth century CE and perhaps even as late as the ninth century CE”, and goes on to argue why bananas could not have reached West Africa by 2500 bp. His argument is based on the assumption that India is the area of origin of the AAl3 bananas, with the consequence that they must have been cultivated in the dry areas of North and East Africa before their difhsion to the humid parts of West Africa. To support his position, he refers partly to historical sources such as Pliny’s Natural History, and partly to archaeobotanical evidence recovered during the excavations at the Roman port of Berenike, and notes that no trace of banana was found there, or is reported in any of the ancient historical sources. It will be shown below why the route proposed by Vansina is out of the question, making these sources irrelevant. Vansina’s other arguments are based on a critical review of the reference material used to identify the Cameroonian phytoliths. We respond to these critricisms in the second part of this note.


Vegetation History and Archaeobotany | 2017

A morphometric study of variance in articulated dendritic phytolith wave lobes within selected species of Triticeae and Aveneae

Terry Ball; Luc Vrydaghs; Tess Mercer; Madison Pearce; Spencer Snyder; Zsuzsa Lisztes-Szabó; Ákos Pető

Morphometric analysis has proven to be an effective tool for distinguishing among phytolith assemblages produced by closely related plant taxa. Elongate dendritic epidermal phytoliths are produced in the inflorescence bracts of many cereal species. Under light microscopy, these articulated dendritic phytoliths produce wave patterns between the margins of the cells that are reported to have taxonomic significance. In this study we explore morphometric variance among the lobes of the wave patterns formed by the articulated dendritic phytoliths within selected species of cereals as a first step towards understanding the variance between species. We found that there is often significant variance in dendritic wave lobes among different accessions of a species, among the different types of inflorescence bracts of the species (glumes, lemmas and paleae), and among each bract type’s location on the inflorescence (upper, middle and lower third of inflorescence spike or panicle). We observed that shape morphometries are typically more reliable and require a smaller sample size for statistical confidence than size morphometries. We further observed that adequate samples sizes for analysis of several shape morphometries of articulated dendritic wave lobes are considerably smaller than those reported to be required for analysis of the same morphometries of individual or isolated dendritic phytoliths. To gain a preliminary sense whether there is potential for discriminating between taxa in light of the significant variance within species, we compared our data to archaeological material from the historical center of Brussels. We demonstrate that while there is considerable variance in the morphometries among accessions, bract types and inflorescence locations within each species, there may yet be potential for discriminating between cereal species in archaeological samples by the morphometries of their dendritic phytolith wave lobes. We present one possible paradigm for conducting such analysis on archaeological material.


Vegetation History and Archaeobotany | 2017

Phytoliths in archaeology: recent advances

Katharina Neumann; Alexandre Chevalier; Luc Vrydaghs

In the last two decades, the number of phytolith studies has been growing exponentially (Hart 2016), and phytolith analysis has developed into an established methodological tool for answering numerous archaeological and palaeoenvironmental questions. In archaeology, phytoliths can give information about origin and dispersal of domesticated plants (Ball et al. 2016), diet, agricultural practices, plant processing, the use of domestic space and non-dietary plant exploitation, to name but a few. This special volume of VHA illustrates the rapidly increasing importance of phytoliths in archaeology. It is one of the outcomes of the 9th International Meeting for Phytolith Research (IMPR), which was held at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, in Brussels, 10th– 12th September 2012. The 9th IMPR gathered 69 participants from 19 different countries over six continents (Argentina, Brazil and Chile; Canada and USA; Australia and New Zealand; China and South Korea; Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Russia, Spain, United Kingdom; South Africa). The main theme of the conference was ‘‘Towards integrative phytolith research’’. The aim was to highlight the interpretative potential when using several lines of evidence, a modern standard in archaeology. The studies assembled in this volume combine phytoliths with plant macro-remains, pollen, starch, non-pollen palynomorphs (NPPs), organic residues, micro-charcoal, geochemistry, ancient DNA (aDNA) and micromorphology. Phytoliths are a valuable source of proxy evidence when other botanical remains, such as seeds or charcoal, are absent, but their full potential becomes evident when they are used as a complementary tool in a multiproxy approach with the help of multivariate statistics, for example Pet}o et al. (2015). In most archaeological and palaeoenvironmental sites, Poaceae phytoliths make up the majority of the silicified plant remains, and it is therefore not surprising that grass phytoliths are the main topic in nine of the ten papers presented here. Grass phytoliths are very diverse and show a high degree of multiplicity, thus numerous different morphotypes can exist in different parts of the same plant specimen (Rovner 1971). Poaceae culms, leaves and inflorescences produce distinct phytolith morphotypes which open up a wealth of new applications in the reconstruction of human activities connected to cereal cultivation, harvest, storage and processing, as well as secondary and tertiary use of by-products, such as straw, chaff and dung. Three papers (Dal Corso et al., Bates et al., GarciaGranero et al.) deal with archaeological phytolith evidence for crop processing. The study of Dal Corso et al. on a Bronze Age site in Italy highlights the explanatory potential of phytoliths for studying archaeological contexts outside of domestic structures. Samples from a shallow ditch filled with settlement waste and from a near-site fen included wheat and barley chaff phytoliths that indicated the processing of cereals at the site and the possible use of chopped straw as fodder. Silica skeletons from the inflorescences of panicoid grasses, although not identifiable to Communicated by F. Bittmann.


Environmental Archaeology | 2018

Visibility, Preservation and Colour: A Descriptive System for the Study of Opal Phytoliths in (Archaeological) Soil and Sediment Thin Sections

Luc Vrydaghs; Yannick Devos

ABSTRACT Phytoliths are abundantly reported in (archaeological) soil thin sections. However, standard description systems are largely missing. The purpose of this paper is to present a descriptive system describing three aspects of phytoliths in soil thin sections: visibility, preservation and colour (VPC). The visibility expresses to which extent the phytoliths are masked or surrounded by fine material. The preservation is an indicator for the physico-chemical alterations that affected the phytoliths. Finally, colour is an indicator of the charring of the organic material surrounding the phytoliths.


Rethinking agriculture: archaeological and ethnoarchaeological perspectives. | 2007

Rethinking agriculture : archaeological and ethnoarchaeological perspectives

Tim Denham; José Iriarte; Luc Vrydaghs


Journal of Archaeological Science | 2000

Evidence for Banana Cultivation and Animal Husbandry During the First Millennium bc in the Forest of Southern Cameroon

C. Mbida; Wim Van Neer; Hugues Doutrelepont; Luc Vrydaghs


Ethnobotany Research and Applications | 2009

Why Bananas Matter: An introduction to the history of banana domestication

Edmond De Langhe; Luc Vrydaghs; Pierre de Maret; Xavier Perrier; Tim Denham

Collaboration


Dive into the Luc Vrydaghs's collaboration.

Top Co-Authors

Avatar

Yannick Devos

Université libre de Bruxelles

View shared research outputs
Top Co-Authors

Avatar

Cristiano Nicosia

Université libre de Bruxelles

View shared research outputs
Top Co-Authors

Avatar

Terry Ball

Brigham Young University

View shared research outputs
Top Co-Authors

Avatar

Edmond De Langhe

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

View shared research outputs
Top Co-Authors

Avatar

Lien Speleers

Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences

View shared research outputs
Top Co-Authors

Avatar

Barbora Wouters

Vrije Universiteit Brussel

View shared research outputs
Top Co-Authors

Avatar

Elena Marinova

Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences

View shared research outputs
Top Co-Authors

Avatar

Paulo Charruadas

Université libre de Bruxelles

View shared research outputs
Top Co-Authors

Avatar

Pierre de Maret

Université libre de Bruxelles

View shared research outputs
Top Co-Authors

Avatar
Researchain Logo
Decentralizing Knowledge