Advances in phytolith research in archaeology and paleoecology: developments and applications

Vegetation History and Archaeobotany https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-025-01035-w EDITORIAL Advances in phytolith research in archaeology and paleoecology: developments and applications Marta Dal Corso1,2 Welmoed A. Out8 · Ákos Pető3 · Luc Vrydaghs4 · Rosa Maria Albert5,6 · Wiebke Kirleis2 · Ana Polo-Diaz7 · © The Author(s) 2025 We are honoured to present this special issue in Vegetation History and Archaeobotany resulting from the 12th International Meeting for Phytolith Research (IMPR). The IMPR is the official conference of the International Phytolith Society (IPS, https://phytoliths.org/). Phytoliths are microscopic bodies produced by living plants consisting of opal silica (for phytolith formation see discussion and references in Hodson et al. 2020). In the longue durée, they survive in multiple palaeoecological as well as archaeological archives (e.g. Strömberg et al. 2018; Cabanes 2020). Used alone or in combination with other proxies, they allow to address topical issues related to major socio-cultural, environmental and climatological developments in the past. Phytolith studies witnessed an increase Marta Dal Corso 1 Department of Geosciences, University of Padua, Via Giovanni Gradenigo, 6, 35131 Padova, PD, Italy 2 Institute of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaeology, Kiel University, Johanna-Mestorf- Straße 2-6, 24118 Kiel, Germany 3 Department of Nature Conservation and Landscape Management, Hungarian University of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Villányi út 29-43, Budapest 1118, Hungary 4 Archaeology, Environmental Changes & Geo-Chemistry (AMGC) - VUB, Pleinlaan 2, Brussels 1050, Belgium 5 ICREA, Passeig Lluís Companys 23, Barcelona, Barcelona 08010, Spain 6 Department of Prehistory, Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), 08193 Cerdanyola del Vallès, Barcelona, Spain 7 Department of Archaeology, University of Sheffield, 40 Leavygreave Rd, Broomhall, Sheffield S3 7RD, UK 8 Department of Archaeological Science and Conservation, Moesgaard Museum, Moesgaard Allé 20, Højbjerg 8270, Denmark in applications within the fields of archaeology, ecology and taxonomy, amongst others. With the increase of phytolith-related studies, the demand for forums where phytolith researchers can share and exchange knowledge, manifested in the 1st IMPR held in Madrid in 1996. For a long period, the biannual meetings were organised by European research centres engaged in phytolith research: 1st IMPR Madrid 1996 (Pinilla et al. 1997); 2nd IMPR Aix-en-Provence 1998 (Meunier and Colin 2001); 3rd IMPR Brussels 2000; 4th IMPR Cambridge 2002 (Madella and Zurro 2007); 5th IMPR Moscow 2004; 6th IMPR Barcelona 2006 (Albert and Madella 2009). Looking back to the first meeting in Madrid, we can retrospectively state that the conference has established a highly diverse multi- and interdisciplinary platform for all those researchers, who were and still are engaged in the world of phytolith analysis, as reflected by the title of the Madrid proceedings: “The state-of-the-art of phytoliths in soils and plants” (Pinilla et al. 1997). The first non-European event within the line of IMPRs, the 7th IMPR, marks a historical meeting as it was held together with the 4th South American Meeting on Phytolith Research in 2008 at Mar del Plata, Argentina (Osterrieth 2008; Madella et al. 2013). The IMPR remained in the Americas for the following conference: the 8th IMPR was organised in Estes Park, Colorado, USA (2011), within the scenery setting of the Rocky Mountains. For the successive two events the IMPR returned to Europe: 9th IMPR Brussels 2014 (Neumann et al. 2017); 10th IMPR Aix-en-Provence 2016. During the 11th meeting, organised in Wuhan 2018, phytolith researchers came together for the first time in China and on the Asian continent. Subsequently, the 12th IMPR returned to Europe again. It took place in Germany and was part of the annual meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA), one of Europe’s most popular archaeological meetings. By the time we prepared this special issue as outcome of the 12th IMPR, the 13th IMPR had taken place at the foot of Mt. Masada in 13 Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 2023, Dead Sea, Israel (Katz et al. in prep.), and the upcoming 14th IMPR will take place in Barcelona in 2025. An overview of the conferences and abstracts can be found at h ttps://phytoliths.org/international-meetings-on-phytolith-re search/. Aside from these worldwide conferences, and occa sional sessions at other international conferences (e.g. Hart 2016), there are also more regionally and continentally oriented meetings, reoccurring taking place e.g. in Australia, South America, China and Europe, underlining the extent to which phytolith research is applied. For instance, the “South American Meeting on Phytolith Research”, organised by the GSFACS (Grupo de Estudios Fitolíticos Aplicados del Cono Sur), took place several times in Argentina and the third “Latin American Workshop on Micropaleoethnobotany” will be held in 2025 in Estado do Paraná, Brazil. Throughout the series of phytolith meetings, the scientific scope of these events broadened: besides botanical and pedological approaches, archaeology, environmental history/paleoecology as well as morphometric and taxonomic studies became more and more popular. The diversification of phytolith studies can also be measured in the establishment of various committees working under the auspices of the IPS (https://phytoliths.org/ips-standing-committees/). One main outcome has been the establishment of the International Code for Phytoliths Nomenclature by the ICPN working group (ICPN 1.0, Madella et al. 2005) later updated by the International Committee for Phytolith Taxonomy (ICPN 2.0, ICPT, Neumann et al. 2019). Another IPS committee is the International Committee for Phytolith Morphometrics (ICPM), which has published open source morphometric software and recommendations towards standardisation of phytolith morphometry (Ball et al. 2016), a review on morphometrics in archaeobotany (Portillo et al. 2020) and recently a study on inter- and intra-observer variation in phytolith morphometry to work towards improved standardisation, which also includes revised instructions for the open source software (Out et al. 2024a). Finally, the International Committee on Open Phytolith Science (ICOPS, https://ope n-phytoliths.netlify.app/) aims to increase the knowledge of and implementation of open science practices in phytolith research, whilst striving to make phytolith research more open, reproducible and FAIR (https://www.go-fair.org/fair -principles/). This committee has been organising training courses on GitHub, clinic sessions on open science, training workshops on open research, a project on increasing the FAIRness of phytolith data, and has provided guidelines on open publishing (Karoune 2022; Kerfant et al. 2023; RuizPérez et al. 2024). One emerging key element of the IMPRs consists of workshops organised (...truncated)