Nine Centuries, Seven Words: Cross-Cultural and Cross-Temporal Evidence for the Erosion of Gallo-Lucanian Plant Heritage in Inland Southern Italy.

This study investigates traditional plant knowledge among Gallo-Lucanian and Lucanian-speaking communities of inland Lucania (Basilicata), Southern Italy, through a cross-cultural and cross-temporal ethnobotanical approach. In a handful of mountain villages, a Gallo-Lucanian substratum survives, carried south by settlers from Piedmont and Liguria between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries; nine hundred years later, we ask what remains of the plants and of the words they brought with them. Fieldwork carried out in 2024 and 2025 with 90 participants in fifteen municipalities, half of them Gallo-Lucanian and half Lucanian speakers, documented 127 identified plant taxa and 12 emic taxa used mainly as wild food and household medicine. The two communities share most of their botanical repertoire: 74 taxa are cited by both, and their Jaccard similarity reaches 0.58. What sets them apart is not the flora but the lexicon, together with the emphasis placed on individual taxa, which differs significantly between the groups. Seven vernacular phytonyms have no counterpart in the surrounding Southern Italian dialects and preserve forms with plausible Piedmontese or Ligurian cognates; several survive attached to plants no longer gathered, so the word outlives the practice it once named. Set against surveys carried out in the same region in 2000-2005 and in inland Liguria, the contemporary repertoire has contracted, particularly among taxa of montane and subalpine distribution, in a landscape reshaped by pastoral decline, land abandonment and recurrent drought. Notably, a substantial share of the gathered taxa is crop wild relatives, among them Beta vulgaris, Daucus carota, Lactuca serriola, Cynara cardunculus, Pastinaca sativa, Asparagus acutifolius, Diplotaxis tenuifolia, Prunus spinosa and Pyrus spinosa, maintained in the interstitial habitats of terraces, field margins and abandoned pastures that these inner areas still preserve. Folk plant uses recorded in minority communities thus provide both a sensitive record of biocultural change and a route to identifying, conserving in situ, and potentially using plant genetic resources in marginal Mediterranean territories.