Interest of Naturalist Collections and Drawings for Archaeobotany: The Example of Sorghum Specimens of the Ethnobotanical Collections of the French National Museum of Natural History

The ethnobotanical collections of the French National Museum of Natural History shelter about 50,000 herbaria specimens collected from the early 20th century in all continents. Auguste Chevalier founded this collection in 1911 to study useful plants and their application for economic development. Then, as the direction of the laboratory changed, the research thematic evolved to ethnobotanical issues. Nowadays, recent projects aim to valorise the specimens by a digitisation process in order to offer access and visibility to these collections. Moreover, because of their origin and the diversity represented, the collections hold an important value for current research. For example, the sorghum collection (Sorghum spp.), containing about 1,000 specimens, is a precious resource to explore the taxonomy and morphological properties of sorghum varieties. To do this, we developed several scientific illustrations of the various morphotypes of sorghum, integrated to the determination tool Xper3. This material can have applications for other disciplines by supplying well identified, documented and accessible seed references. Exploring different illustration techniques, the use of scientific drawing supplied relevant tools to determine the morphotype of two sorghum seeds from the archaeological site of Mouweis in Sudan. The identification of the morphotype (caudatum) has enabled the completion of the puzzling history of sorghum.