Data Brief. 2026 Jan 7;64:112443. doi: 10.1016/j.dib.2025.112443. eCollection 2026 Feb.

ABSTRACT

Here we present a coherent, georeferenced and chronologically qualified corpus of fossil plant remains compiled from published archaeobotanical records from archaeological sites from Central Italy, focused on Olea europaea (olive) and Vitis vinifera (grape). The dataset is entirely based on secondary data and does not include newly generated primary archaeobotanical analyses. The dataset integrates site, context and all relevant archaeobotanical occurrences within a coherent relational and spatial model. The corpus was initiated through a structured bibliographic survey aided by the BRAIN database. Exclusively published literature was consulted, allowing to model archaeological sites and link them to excavation contexts and individual archaeobotanical occurrences (defined as the combination of a taxon and the specific plant part recovered, e.g., fruit, seed, rachis). The geodatabase was implemented using QGIS, with a local backend in GeoPackage, then migrated to PostgreSQL/PostGIS to support complex spatial/relational queries and future online outputs. All entities have a defined spatial placement accompanied by explicit quality-control parameters documenting positional uncertainty, source type and authority, as derived from the original published sources, ensuring transparent assessment of locational reliability. To enrich taxonomic information, an automated open thesaurus was built from CC BY/CC BY-SA resources (Floritaly, Acta Plantarum, and Wikimedia projects). The workflow employs REST-style access (or form-equivalent submissions), conservative rate-limiting, randomized waits, retries, and checkpoints; provenance and attribution (including noted transformations) are preserved. A standardized chronological table harmonizes relative cultural phases using ICCD nomenclature, with controlled fallbacks to Perio.do or peer-reviewed literature; a self-referential hierarchy (parent_id) ensures inheritance from sub-phase to broader period. Crucially, the use of open licenses, stable identifiers and cross-references makes the dataset interoperable and interlinked with the source ecosystems from which the secondary archaeobotanical data were extracted: records can resolve back to Floritaly and Acta Plantarum, and our forthcoming web portal can expose these connections for bidirectional navigation, automated updating and external reuse. The result is an interoperable, verifiable resource suitable for spatial and temporal analyses of plant remains based on aggregated and standardized published archaeobotanical data, while remaining legally reusable under the original licenses.

PMID:41624435 | PMC:PMC12855569 | DOI:10.1016/j.dib.2025.112443