Media coverage
St Brigid's Day is celebrated on 1st February in Ireland. St Brigid is thought to have lived around 1500 years ago, and tales associated with St Brigid are often focused on farming and food production. Historically, people sought blessings and miracles from saints such as St Brigid, praying for bountiful harvests and fertile land and animals. Today we face new challenges in farming, such as decreasing crop diversity and the impacts of climate change. CROPREVIVE seeks to address these challenge by unlocking ancient farming practices, offering exciting and sustainable potential for present and future Irish agriculture and food production.
To mark St Brigid's Day in 2024, CROPREVIVE was (opens in a new window)featured in The Irish Times (top image) and (opens in a new window)the Irish Farmers Journal (image above).
Conferences
At the beginning of December, 2022, we displayed a poster to introduce the project at the annual conference of the Association for Environmental Archaeology, which took place in Glasgow. The AEA is the largest organisation of environmental archaeologists in Europe. The conference provided a great opportunity to share our concept and plans with a large number of colleagues.
In the summer of 2023, we presented our research at two major, international conferences. This enabled the team to gather valuable feedback on our approaches and initial findings.
In June 2023, Sofía Vargas Sielfeld presented a poster at IPSAM (Irish Plant Scientists' Association Meeting) in Belfast. This conference brings together a wide-ranging community of researchers in the plant sciences, phytopathology, plant genetics and genomics, ecology, plant phenology, horticulture, forestry, soil and rhizosphere science. Sofía’s poster was entitled “Ancient crops in Ireland: a screening of peas, rye and emmer wheat production”. Due to the scarcity of emmer wheat production in modern Ireland, the poster focused on rye and peas, highlighting hotspots for cultivation. The poster also explored constraints - such as lodging for peas and ergot for rye - and potential solutions
In August 2023, Adam Collins presented an oral paper at the EAA (European Association of Archaeologists) conference in Belfast. The EAA is one of the largest meetings of archaeologists in the world, and the Belfast conference attracted more than 3000 participants. Adam’s paper was entitled “Why won’t you eat your peas?! An interdisciplinary approach towards investigating underutilised crops”. The paper explored the long history of pea production in Ireland, highlighting its peak during the medieval period (AD 1150-1550), and comparing the location of ancient finds with modern practices.
Watch this space for further conference presentations in 2024.
The project is funded by the Irish Research Council COALESCE Scheme (2022–2024; Strand 2A; Project ID: COALESCE/2022/1647).
