How to rescue seed´s heritage? An essential question for ReSEED Project guided its first workshop that took place on May 23, 2019, at the Museum of Natural History and Science of the University of Lisbon. The event is part of the process called “construction of historical sources” that is a crucial phase within the scope of the project´s work program.
As the transdisciplinary approach is at the heart of ReSEED´s methodology, researchers with diverse scientific backgrounds and work experiences were invited, namely historians, biologists, archaeologists, agronomists and landscape architects. They all have been contributing to deepening knowledge about seeds, agriculture, food, rural dynamics, science or environment.
The core of the workshop was organized in two round tables that allowed a freer discussion. The first one, “Building the corpus of historical sources”, focused on the documents that may be more relevant to identify the local varieties that have been cultivated in the Iberian Peninsula in recent centuries.
“Information from historical sources comes in different forms and is often scarce or confusing. The discussion confirmed the need to cross the different disciplines to find and analyse this information” explained ReSEED´s principal investigator Dulce Freire.
The second round table, “Connecting current information with historical data” contributed to evaluating if what is known about local varieties that still exist, namely those cultivated by farmers and those available in the seed banks, can be linked to historical knowledge.
Both discussions proved to be very fruitful to guide the research that the ReSEED team is developing. The sessions were recorded and the content will be useful in scientific outputs of the project.
