RESEARCH ARTICLE Literary evidence for taro in the ancient Mediterranean: A chronology of names and uses in a multilingual world Ilaria Maria Grimaldi1,2*, Sureshkumar Muthukumaran3, Giulia Tozzi4, Antonino Nastasi5, Nicole Boivin1,6, Peter J. Matthews7, Tinde van Andel2 1 Research Laboratory for Archaeology & the History of Art, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2 Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden, The Netherlands, 3 Faculty of History, Yale-NUS College, Singapore, Singapore, 4 Dipartimento dei Beni Culturali: archeologia, storia dell'arte, del cinema e della musica, Università degli Studi di Padova, Padova, Italy, 5 Dipartimento di Lettere, Arti e Scienze sociali, a1111111111 Università degli Studi ªGabriele d'Annunzioº of Chieti-Pescara, Chieti, Italy, 6 Max Planck Institute for the a1111111111 Science of Human History, Jena, Germany, 7 National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan a1111111111 a1111111111 *
[email protected] a1111111111 Abstract Taro, Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott, is a vegetable and starchy root crop cultivated in OPEN ACCESS Asia, Oceania, the Americas, Africa, and the Mediterranean. Very little is known about its Citation: Grimaldi IM, Muthukumaran S, Tozzi G, early history in the Mediterranean, which previous authors have sought to trace through Nastasi A, Boivin N, Matthews PJ, et al. (2018) Classical (Greek and Latin) texts that record the name colocasia (including cognates) from Literary evidence for taro in the ancient Mediterranean: A chronology of names and uses in the 3rd century BC onwards. In ancient literature, however, this name also refers to the a multilingual world. PLoS ONE 13(6): e0198333. sacred lotus, Nelumbo nucifera Gaertn. and its edible rhizome. Like taro, lotus is an alien https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0198333 introduction to the Mediterranean, and there has been considerable confusion regarding the Editor: Rainer Bussmann, Missouri Botanical true identity of plants referred to as colocasia in ancient literature.