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This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research
and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska -Curie grant agreement No
895735.

Further information: https://www.olea.unimore.it/ (web) and @Olea-Project (twitter)

The Laboratory of Palynology and Palaeobotany in Unimore

The laboratory of Modena is a university centre of research and teaching of Palynology,
Archaeobotany and Botany. Since the first steps, starting in 1981, the research has
been carried out in different fields with an interdisciplinary perspective combining biolo-

gical sciences with geology, aerobiology, and archaeology. Archaeobotany is currently
the focus of its activity on Bronze age studies, Roman and Mediaeval archaeological
sites of (northern to southern) Italy, Sahara, and Kurdistan. Main topics under investiga-
tion are past climate oscillations and environmental transformations, cultural landsca-
pes, and the role of plants in cultural evolution from the Lateglacial to the present in the
Mediterranean region. Modena proposed and coordinated the EU-Culture 2000 project
PaCE (“Plants and Culture: roots of a cultural heritage of Europe”) with the main idea of
creating an interdisciplinary cooperation on the scientific and humanistic cultural herita-
ge of Europe, based on the links among Plants and Culture.

The LPP at a glance:

• Study of past and present environmental records from Mediterranean sites

• Analyses of microscopical (pollen, NPPs) and macroscopical (seeds/fruits, often also
woods/charcoals)

• The laboratory is fully equipped with high-quality research microscopes for pollen (5
optical microscopes with transmitted light) and macroremains analyses (3 stereomi-
croscopes)

• Reference pollen collection with more than 10,000 slides
• Reference seed collection with more than 2,000 Mediterranean species

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