Dr. Luc Vrydaghs

With 30 years of experience in the field of phytolith analysis, I studied material coming from Europe, the Near East, Central Africa and Easter Island.

Last 20 years and in collaboration with Y. Devos, within the framework of the palaeo- and archaeoenvironmental studies in the Brussels region, we developed the phytolith analysis of archaeological soil thin section. This technique allows to discriminate the depositional histories of the phytoliths as well as to identify those phytoliths sharing a common botanical origin. It also broadens the perspectives for morphometrical analysis of archaeological phytoliths

Five key publications:

Ball, T.B., Vrydaghs, L., Mercer, T., Pearce, M., Snyder, S., Lisztes-Szabo, Z. and Peto, A., 2017. A morphometric study of variance in articulated dendritic phytolith wave lobes within selected species of Triticeae and Aveneae. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 26 (1): 85-97 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-015-0551-x

International Committee for Phytolith Taxonomy (ICPT) (Katharina Neumann, Caroline A. E. Strömberg, Terry Ball, Rosa Maria Albert, Luc Vrydaghs and Linda Scott Cummings, 2019. International Code for Phytolith Nomenclature (ICPN) 2.0; Annals of Botany 124 (2): 189–199; https://doi.org/10.1093/aob/mcz064.

VRYDAGHS, L. and DEVOS, Y. 2018. Visibility, Preservation and Colour (VPC): a descriptive system for the study of opal phytoliths in (archaeological) soil and sediment thin sections. Environmental archaeology. https://doi.org/10.1080/14614103.2018.1501867

Vrydaghs, L and Devos Y. 2018. Phytolith analysis of soil and ceramic thin sections. In Smith, Cl. (ed), Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_3286-1

Vrydaghs, L., Ball, T.B. and Devos, Y. 2016. Beyond redundancy and multiplicity. Integrating phytolith analysis and micromorphology to the study of Brussels Dark Earth. Journal of Archaeological Sciences 68: 79-88 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2015.09.004

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