Archaeological and Historical Materials as a Means to Explore Finnish Crop History

Abstract

In Northern Europe, barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) has been cultivated for almost 6000 years. Thus far, 150-year-old grains from historical collections have been used to investigate the distribution of barley diversity and how the species has spread across the region. Genetic studies of archaeobotanical material from agrarian sites could potentially clarify earlier migration patterns and cast further light on the origin of barley landraces. In this study, we aimed to evaluate different archaeological and historical materials with respect to DNA content, and to explore connections between Late Iron Age and medieval barley populations and historical samples of barley landraces in northwest Europe. The material analysed consisted of archaeological samples of charred barley grains from four sites in southern Finland, and historical material, with 33 samples obtained from two herbaria and the seed collections of the Swedish museum of cultural history. The DNA concentrations obtained from charred archaeological barley remains were too low for successful KASP genotyping confirming previously reported difficulties in obtaining aDNA from charred remains. Historical samples from herbaria and seed collection confirmed previously shown strong genetic differentiation between two-row and six-row barley. Six-row 2 barley accessions from northern and southern Finland tended to cluster apart, while no geographical structuring was observed among two-row barley. Genotyping of functional markers revealed that the majority of barley cultivated in Finland in the late 19th and early 20th century was late-flowering under increasing day-length, supporting previous findings from northern European barley.

Population structure in landrace barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) during the late 19th century crop failures in Fennoscandia

“…Indeed, Forsberg et al (2015) studying as few as six individuals from each of 31 historical accessions from all over Fennoscandia and Denmark, showed how six-row barley from northernmost Fennoscandia was, as a group, genetically differentiated from six-row barley elsewhere in the region. Similar results were obtained by Lempiäinen-Avci et al (2018) focusing on Finnish barley.…”

Ancient DNA typing indicates that the “new” glume wheat of early Eurasian agriculture is a cultivated member of the Triticum timopheevii group

“…Since the initial report of aDNA in charred cereal grains (Allaby et al, 1994), there has been extensive debate regarding the extent to which DNA is preserved in this type of material. Early conclusions that aDNA is present in, at best, only a few grains from an archaeobotanical sample (Allaby et al, 1997;Brown, 1999) have been confirmed by several papers reporting negative results (Brown et al, 1998;Brown, 1999;Oliveira et al, 2012;Fernandez et al, 2013;Nistelberger et al, 2016;Lundstrom et al, 2018;Lempiäinen-Avci et al, 2020). Recently, the ability of DNA to withstand the heating conditions needed to produce charred archaeobotanical material has been questioned (Nistelberger et al, 2016;Lundstrom et al, 2018), but this view is arguably over-pessimistic, requiring that the numerous positive reports of aDNA in charred wheat, barley and rice remains (Allaby et al, 1994(Allaby et al, , 1997(Allaby et al, , 1999Blatter et al, 2002;Schlumbaum et al, 1998;Fernandez et al, 2013;Bilgic et al, 2016;Tanaka et al, 2010, Castillo et al, 2016Ciftci et al, 2019) be dismissed as illusory.…”

“…Utilization of a PCR test for taxonomic identification of the NGW would require analysis of ancient DNA (aDNA), which is challenging with charred cereal specimens due to the extensive DNA breakdown that occurs during the heating process involved in preservation of these remains (Threadgold and Brown, 2003). It is clear that with many charred grains the degree of transformation to carbon is such that preserved aDNA cannot be detected by PCR (Brown et al, 1998;Brown, 1999;Oliveira et al, 2012;Fernandez et al, 2013;Lundstrom et al, 2018;Lempiäinen-Avci et al, 2020) or by next generation sequencing (Nistelberger et al, 2016). This does not, however, negate the conclusions of early work that some grains in some charred samples retain DNA fragments that are sufficiently intact to be amplified by highly specific and sensitive PCR tests (Brown, 1999), as shown by the numerous reports of aDNA sequences obtained from charred cereal samples (e.g.…”

Chevalier barley: The influence of a world‐leading malting variety

“…The remaining SNPs were chosen from the 384 C‐SNP set developed for European landraces (Moragues et al., 2010) from the BOPA1 array (Kota et al., 2008). The SNPs chosen were distributed across all seven barley chromosomes and had previously be verified to be polymorphic in Nordic barley (Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland) (Forsberg et al., 2015; Lempiäinen‐Avci et al., 2020). Following genotyping, two markers, 11_11059 and 11_20897, were removed due to poor success rate (24.5 and 14.2% success rate, respectively).…”

“…The majority of the markers had previously been genotyped in historical two‐row landrace barley from the Nordic area (Norway, Sweden, and Finland; Lempiäinen‐Avci et al., 2020; Hagenblad & Leino, unpublished data, 2011; Supplemental Table S3). Data from these accessions were used to compare the Chevalier barley genotyped in this study with landrace barley of the two‐row type.…”