The Archaeobotanist

Rice archaeology linguistics and genetics special issue

2012-01-29T20:24:00.000Z

The special issue of Rice arising from the Cornell rice, genetics and linguistics meeting is now complete and fully paginated. I have blogged several of the papers earlier (listed below). Those papers in the issue are well summarized in the editorial: "In this issue, 12 articles and 1 of the symposium discussants’ commentaries have been included. The first four (by Fuller, Bellwood, d’Alpoim-Guèdes, and Castillo) review and expand the archaeological knowledge about early agriculture in Asia and its wider region. Fuller, who served as a keynote speaker at the symposium, pays special attention to the pan-Asian context, as well as to South Asian developments. The next four articles (by Sagart, Bradley, Southworth, and Whitman) treat the same scope of issues from the perspective mainly of historical linguistics. The contribution by Sanchez-Mazas and her colleagues offers an updated perspective from human genetics, and the two following papers (the first by Takashige and his colleagues and the second by Hsieh, Hsing, and their colleagues), from plant genetics, also reconnecting to the multidisciplinary aspirations of the symposium. In addition, we publish a paper on inter-Asian rice exchanges in later historical periods by veteran agricultural economist Randolph Barker, as well as the revised remarks by Richard O’Connor, one of several symposium discussants."

Amongst the later published papers is piece by the Linguist Frank Southworth, mainly focused on Dravidian India. Of particular note is the reintroduction into main stream linguistics of the "Elamo-Dravidian" hypothesis.

Here are the full list of papers. They can be found on-line here.

Pathways to Asian Civilizations: Tracing the Origins and Spread of Rice and Rice Cultures. Dorian Q. Fuller

The Checkered Prehistory of Rice Movement Southwards as a Domesticated Cereal—from the Yangzi to the Equator. Peter Bellwood [blog notes]

Millets, Rice, Social Complexity, and the Spread of Agriculture to the Chengdu Plain and Southwest China. Jade d’Alpoim Guedes [blog notes]

Rice in Thailand: The Archaeobotanical Contribution. Cristina Castillo [blog notes]

How Many Independent Rice Vocabularies in Asia?. Laurent Sagart [blog notes]

Proto-Tibeto-Burman Grain Crops. David Bradley [blog notes]

Rice in Dravidian. Franklin Southworth

Northeast Asian Linguistic Ecology and the Advent of Rice Agriculture in Korea and Japan. John Whitman [blog notes]

A Genetic Focus on the Peopling History of East Asia: Critical Views. Alicia Sanchez-Mazas, Da Di and María Eugenia Riccio

Evaluation of Genetic Variation Among Wild Populations and Local Varieties of Rice

Takashige Ishii, Takashi Hiraoka, Tomoyuki Kanzaki, Masahiro Akimoto and Rieko Shishido, et al.

Studies on Ancient Rice—Where Botanists, Agronomists, Archeologists, Linguists, and Ethnologists Meet. Jaw-shu Hsieh, Yue-ie Caroline Hsing, Tze-fu Hsu, Paul Jen-kuei Li and Kuang-ti Li, et [blog notes]

The Origin and Spread of Early-Ripening Champa Rice: It’s Impact on Song Dynasty China. Randolph Barker

Discussant’s Remarks: Reviving Ethnology to Understand the Rice Neolithic. Richard A. O’Connor

African archaeobotany volume published

2012-01-21T15:47:00.000Z

The publication of the 6th African Archaeobotany conference volume, with a december 2011 date, has been announced: Windows on the African Past. Current Approaches to African Archaeobotany, edited by Ahmed Fahmy, Catherine D'Andrea, Stefanie Kahlheber. Published by AfricaMagna.

An Embarrassment for me, as the previous African archaeobotany conference held in London is still not published. Ooops. Hope to have that squared away soon!

Just in time for the 7th IWAA in Vienna.

(and judging for the contents, there is nothing new to add to out lack of knowledge of the early history of Africa rice: so the challenge remains)

Health of archaeobotany: looking good

2012-01-20T14:26:00.000Z

How does one keep tabs on the health of a discipline? Having just discovered google's NGRAMs tool, an obvious game to play to to plug in ones favorite words, or words for what we do, and see how they may as a percentage of published words (or the words in the massive google books archive) over time. How does archaeobotany do? Although flotation started in the 1960s, a recurrent name for the specialization of studying them lagged behind be almost 2 decades. Interesting use of the phrases "carbonized seeds" took off from the mid-1960s, presumably as a result of the flotation revolution. ). A name for the specialization does become common until almost 2 decades later in the 1980s when paleoethnobotany (American spelling), palaeoethnobotany (UK spelling), and archaeobotany take off. Their take off also correlates with the rise of phytolith research (see below). This graph, although it ends in 2000 also suggests that there may be a move towards a preference of archaeobotany to paleoethnobotany? The decline of carbonized seeds may well track the shift to use of the term "macroremains" which takes off from about 1980 [see below]. The rise of use of the term "phytolith" may start regularly in the 1970s and really takes off in the 1980s. Of course this is only in books and not journal articles, but still...

In a far more nuanced and useful approach to disciplinary health, Naomi Miller circulated a questionnaire on archaeobotany, and has summarized the results in a recent issue of the SAA Archaeobotanical record (Sept. 2011), available as a PDF here. This summary looks at field and lab practice, publication and employment. The complete results are on her website at Penn: PDF. There is some useful insights into variation in practices across Europe, the UK and the US, in the commercial versus university academic context, and as an appendix a list of websites that people of reported.

Debating early African bananas

2012-01-19T14:57:00.001Z

Neumann et al. in a new Quaternary International article "First farmers in the Central African rainforest: A view from southern Cameroon", report a combination of archaeobotanical, apynological and historical linguistic evidence for the nature of early Bantu economies on the northwestern rainforest along margins of central Africa in the First Millennium BC. This includes updated and important discussions of pearl millet, tree nut use (like Canarium and oil palm). These societies brought savanna millet agriculture with them and took advantage of drier conditions to cultivate millet in marginal forest environments, while utilizing (and managing?) forest tree resources as well. Of relevance to those who have argued that bananas were fundamental to early Bantu economies in the rainforest zone (e.g. Blench 2009), however, is the lack of evidence for bananas in these newer excavations. The article includes a short paragraph on bananas, with some quite critical comments on the issue of early African banans ("act two" in the history summarized below on this blog). They note that study in their samples "several thousand phytoliths already counted, no evidence for Musa could be detected. This sheds further doubt on the banana phytoliths from the contemporary third millennium BP site Nkang" and also they argue that, "There are also ecological arguments against cultivation of banana during this period. As is shown in the following, the climate was much more seasonal in the second half of the third millennium BP and thus unfavourable for plantains which require a humid climate without any major oscillations"

So the debate is out in the open. I don't think there is question of whether the reported phytoliths of Nkang are from Musa, but the worry is surely whether these phytoliths are actually of Iron Age date. They are not directly dated, and the possibility of intrusive or contaminating material from later, when bananas are such a prominent part of the present landscape, contamination is what we need to worry about. On the other hand Nkang is not in exactly the same area as the site studied by Neumann et al, so supporters of the early banana hypothesis might point to diverse and varied economies in the Iron Age. All the more reason to chase more archaeobotanical sampling in the region: we are still reliant on a just a few sites.

Globalization of bananas in 3 acts. Recent updates

2012-01-19T14:56:00.001Z

Bananas are an intriguing fruit. Quick growing, and tall, tropical herbs, rather than real trees, known pretty much everywhere today from the most temperate climes, as a typical and inexpensive table fruit, while in other places they serve as starchy staple alongside or even instead of tubers or cereals (and as the base for beer-brewing). Because most cultivated bananas are seedless hybrids tracking them archaeologically is difficult. Various lines of archaeological, linguistic and ethnobotanical evidence were pulled together a couple of years ago in a journal issue, while this year saw some updated syntheses, or at least attempts at synthesis. The origins of cultivated bananas seems to have focused on New Guinea, and the First Act can be regarded as the dispersal throughout most of tropical Asia. A PNAS article this summer, with 18 co-authors, across botany, linguistics and archaeology provided a model of integrating genetics and historical linguistics (with rather more limited archaeology) for tracking the early evolution, diversification of bananas, mainly in SE Asia [pdf]. I still have issues with how the hybridization between A and B genomes took place. The authors postulate an anthropogenic dispersal of M. balbisiana (B), and do not really deal with any potential role of South Asian balbisiana in hybrid bananas. Both parts of India (Orissa through Assam) and Sri Lanka have wild Musa balbisiana; Sri Langa has reports of wild M. acuminata too. It seems clear that Pleistocene (to early Holocene) humans in Sri Lanka were using and probably consuming wild bananas. In addition to the seeds from Beli-lena cave reported years ago by Kajale (in Harris and Hillman's volume Foraging and Farming). To this can be added new phytolith finds, in well-dated stratigraphic context from Batadomba-lena, published in Journal of Human Evolution this past summer. Ongoing phytolith analyses from other Sri Lanka caves, including some work here in London, will have more ancient Musa phytoliths to report soon. It may well be that wild Musa use in Sri Lanka was a dead-end with regards to early cultivars, but it seems premature to rule it out entirely.

Second act: the introduction of bananas and plantains to Africa. Probably the best general account of this is still to be found in the 1999 article by De Langhe and De Maret, and it was also addressed in several of the papers in the 2009 Ethnobotany Research and Applications issue on bananas. But for a summary that places this in the wider context of the translocation of crops, weeds and commensal animals across the Indian ocean, from Asia to Africa see the paper I jointly authored with some other members of the Sealinks project, published in Antiquity this past summer, " Across the Indian Ocean: the prehistoric movement of plants and animals." The evidential lynch-pin for the a pehistoric/Iron Age translocation of bananas (or plantains) remains a single site in Cameroun with reported phytolths, Nkang. This limited evidence, of course, until or unless more is found may be open to critique-- which has been coming from some quarters of Africa archaeobotany. For the latest installment see the recent Neumann et al article in Quanternary International. A short blog here.

Third act: Gobailization via refigerator vessels and 20th century AD supermarket culture. For some account of the modern technology involved in the mass shipping and then ripening of supermarket bananas, specifically in New York city, see this recent blog at Edible Geography.The book Banana: the fate of the fruit that changed the World by Dan Koeppel, deals with this and much, much more; and I have discovered he has his own banana blog.

Tropical rainforest archaeology

2012-01-18T11:04:00.001Z

Just a short not to highlight the publication of a special issue of Quaternary International (volume 249) on human occupation of tropical rainforests, on the theme of how rainforests are themselves artefacts, or "cultural landscapes", to quote from the editorial by Barton, Denham, Neumann and Arroyo-Kalin the papers show "several commonalities can be elicited that enabled hunter-foragers to permanently inhabit rainforest landscapes in different parts of the world"-- which bears on the adaptiveness of Early Modern Human, which lead to cultural parallelisms. In many cases Tropical forests adaptation lead on to agriculture of the more mobile/shifting sort. The volume includes several papers on the Neotropics, Africa and Island Southeast Asia and New Guinea, as well as one on India and Sri Lanka (Kingwell-Banham and Fuller). I have a lot of pages to read and digest, but I previously highlighted on of the African papers by Hohn and Neumann as an excellent example of integrating multiple archaeobotanical datasets, and I regard it as one of the highlights of African Archaeobotany of the past year. I have also previously noted Huw Barton's comparison of rice and sago on Borneo. No doubt many of the other papers in this issue, which I have yet to read, will also be gems.

From Burma to Japan: more on rice and linguistics

2012-01-18T10:48:00.002Z

Two additional paper on rice/cereal agriculture spread and historical linguistics have been published on-line. I recall both from their presentations at Cornell in September as being inciteful and informative: one by David Bradley collects the vocabularies of various cereal crops, always including rice, but also millets and buckwheat in various Tibeto-Burman languages. He concludes that for Tibeto-Burman languages it is the Chinese millets (Setaria and Panicum) that can be most readily reconstructed back, with rice somewhat later. Of interest is that buckwheat appaears later in in common to Eastern Tibeto-Burman languages, who also share barley terms, the latter possibly borrowed from Indian languages. This may be evidence truly independent origin of high mountain agriculture in the eastern Himalayas or Tibetan plateau (buckhwheat), with agriculture in such regions instead being "additive" in the sense that local species were domesticated by farmers who moved in from elsewhere (the lowlands) with other crops (millet).

The other by John Whitman provide a synthesis of linguistic and archaeological evidence for the spread of agriculture in Korea and Japan. The image (left) is from Whitman, and summarizes the archaeological picture. He makes a good case that this fits with known linguistic and epigraphic evidence.

Previous papers in this series blogged here (more linguistics) and here (more archaeological).

African Archaeobotany 2011

2012-01-16T13:18:00.001Z

I am still trying to see through my Holiday period intention of flagging some of the archaeobotanical highlights of 2011. Africa, as a continent, remains one of the archaeobotanically least known and so it worth noting a number of contributions over the past year.

One of the best itegrated studies (from anywhere, not just Africa) of wood charcoal alongside seeds, pollen and other lines of evidence for the study of changing cultivation practices, including shifting cultivation in Burkino Faso by Hohn and Neumann, which is in press but on-line.

A important book released in 2011 was Marijke van der Veen's monograph in the Journal of African Archaeology series on Consumption, Trade and Innovation, which reports the archaeobotanical evidence from the Red Sea trade port of Quesir, an site with both Roman and Islamic era evidence as a port site [table of contents PDF]. It has excellent illustrations and straight forward quantitative analyses that highlight the different food traditions of the Roman and Islamic periods, highlights trade in foods (fruits, nuts, spices), and the much more 'globalized' of pan-Indian Ocean in character, with lemons, eggplants and watermelons consumed for their seeds. I am particularly taken by the evidence for two-way flow. This is not just about importing spices and bananas from the East, but I am struck by how many European imports, like hazelnuts, were also consumed in the Egyptian desert. The evidence for imported spices in Roman and Medieval western Europe, reviewed by Livarda 2011, is remarkably Asian-centric (black pepper, cardamon, a single medieval nutmeg) but some African Melgueta pepper has been reported from European Medieval contexts.

Some small contributions from the lab here in London came out, too:

Manning et al. reported the earliest archaeological Pearl Millet, with direct dates between 2500 and 2000 BC from the Tilemsi valley in NE Mali, and evidence from chaff impressions for non-shatteing domestication traits. The discussion (and supplement) include a database summarizing the whole archaeological record of pearl millet.

Giblin and Fuller reported the first archaeobotanical results from the first flotation in Rwanda, dating from ca. 400 AD to 1200 AD, with sorghum, pearl millet and cowpea from the earliest samples. Of note is the recurrence of finger millet, and this article includes a discussion and supplementary database of the whole archaeological record of finger millet.

Nixon, Murray and Fuller published the archaeobotany from Tadmekka/ Essouk in NE mali the trans-Sahaan trade route. It was Islamic era trade city, with excavated material between 700 and 1400 AD. Amongst the staples were pearl millet and wild grains (Echnichloa, Brachiaria), but there is also evidence for wheat (imported or locally irrigated) and cotton processing (imported or locally irrigated), and several fruits. It includes an effort to tabulate the sum of archaeobotanical evidence for medieval west Africa.

Ruas and Tengberg (from the Paris archaeobotany lab) published an archaeobotanical study from Igiliz in southern Morocco, the first ever from the region, which included a detailed consideration of Argan oil production (blogged previously).

Although not strictly Africa, another study from the Paris lab, Bouchard, Tengberg and Pra report evidence from Mada'in Salih in Saudi Arabia, which expands our archaeological evidence for cotton cultivation, and is discussed alongside that from Bahrain, in relation to the role of arid Arabia in producing cotton as part of date palm oasis cultivation systems in Antiquity.

The last article taken with Sarah Walshaw's article on Swahili era Pemba from the previous year (World Archaeology 2010: "converting to rice"), frames the northern and southern limits of early Old World cotton production.

One looks forward to the new contributions at this years African Archaeobotany Workshop. For my part, we are making some progress on flots from SE Kenya, SW Ethiopia, and some from Mali from Kevin MacDonald's Sorotomo project.

More contributions on rice, linguistics and genetics

2012-01-13T18:05:00.003Z

More papers from the Cornell meeting on rice, linguistics and cultural spread continue to come out on-line. This includes my own attempt ("Pathways to Asian Civilizations") to integrate historical linguistics hypotheses, current archaeobotany and recent genetics (including some considerations of issues blogged a few weeks ago).

Perhaps more importantly it includes a updated assessment of the comparative lingusitics of rice vocabularies by the CNRS linguist Laurent Sagart, who favours an early historical linkage between Sino-Tibetan and Austronesia: for him this relationship is genetic but I wonder whether an early situation on contacts and loans (including millet and rice) makes more sense? An earlier study by Blench collecting rice vocabulary, published in 2008 [available here], deserves to be considered alongside this paper for its extensive tables across several language families. There is updated overview by Peter Bellwood of his language/farming dispersal hypothesis in its Island Southeast Asian hearth, which includes some important new revisions (such as an early migration eastwards to micronesia and shift in line of newer views of Chinese rice domestication as being later). A rice-driven spread of rice through Indonesia looks less and less plausible, and even though there was some early (late 3rd Millennium BC?) from a few sites it may never have really taken hold: i.e. there was a failed "revolution" in grain culture. In a forthcoming article by Huw Barton on the rice versus sago in Borneo, he makes the case that "Rice appears to be an illogical crop choice in the rainforests of Borneo" by comparison to the higher yielding forest staple Sago (see his yield estimates chart below). Serious and persistence rice agriculture may be much more recent (although I guess before the Malay period when rice was moved from this region to Madagascar).

In relation to Austronesian origins, there is also a paper on rice in Taiwan, which mainly reports some genetic data on local land-races, but also provides the best illustrations yet of some archaeobotanical evidence from the site of Nankuanli (including rice and foxtail millet).

There are also some papers of a more palaeoenvironmental flavour on rice. Quaternary International has a second special issue on "Agricultural activities and rice cultivation in East Asia [Part 2]" coming out. Judging from the editorial, we can expect several pollen studies from around East and northeast Asia which detect human farming impacts on vegetation, but little that is likely to change views on the origins and spread of rice, nor on archaeobotany. Part 1 was an issue in late 2010, had a few highlights, such as expanded data and discussion of the vegetation, vegetation burning in relation to the early cultivation site of Kuahuqiao (Shu et al), and Li et al's palynological assessment of vegetation and forests during the Liangzhu period-- worth looking at alongside Fuller & Qin's Environmental Archaeology paper on the environmental context of rice (Dec. 2010). Although it should be noted that Li et al repeat some old mis-identifications from Qianshanyang repeated by non-botanical archaeologists in 1960! Notably "peanut" (introduced via Europeans in the 16th century, see the classic study by Ho 1955) and sesame (probably not older than the Han dynasty: see Fuller 2003)-- the latter certainly is melon (Cucumis melo) which is widely encountered. It pains me to see wrong and unreliable identifications repeated....

More important still is an on-line article by Gary Crawford "Early rice exploitation in the Lower Yangzi: what are we missing?" for a forthcoming issue of The Holocene also on early rice and palaeoenvironment (that I expect to also be an issue that is mainly palynological and sedimentological). It is a thoughtful and provocative paper, partly meant to update Crawford and Shen (1998) and partly meant to be critical of recent work in the Lower Yangtze (including mine), with extended discussions of the issue of immature grains and spikelet base criteria (but without any substantive new suggestions)-- true these criteria are not as straight forward as an either or division, but they still work pretty clearly for characterizing the big trends and transitions. He also summarizes in English a new Chinese proposal (by Gu and Zhao) for morphometric formulae for determining from grain measurements the percentage of rice that was wild or domesticated (although I expect the reliability of such an over-precise formula is dubious). He muddies the definition of "domestication" somewhat by taking a catholic list of "DRT" (domestication-related traits) from the genetics literature-- some of which have little to do with basic crop origins at the beginnings of agriculture, despite their appeal to breeders or the importance in some cultures (like waxiness or white grains). This article includes important critical comments on alleged Pleistocene claims for wild rice, whether from the South China see or Yuchanyan

One of Crawford's main points is to emphasize that we must understand more than rice, that rice "casts a long shadow" on consideration of other resources. (I fully agree, this was the starting point for my original Hemudu critiques [2007, 2008], that 1000s of acorns should not be ignored). He argues consider landscape management for taxa such as oaks and peaches, points I would certainly agree with. He pushes for nut-managers or niche constructors, while characterizing my interpretation as one of "nut-gatherers who became cultivators", which failed to consider other "crops". Perhaps there was management for nuts like acorns (which I suggested in Fuller&Qin 2009), but the problem is that we are hard pressed to see any evidence for this. And if landscapes were managed for nuts (likely to at least some degree) I doubt whether this can be seen as somehow fundamentally different in the Holocene from the kinds of practices that characterized early modern humans in the later Pleistocene (as argued in Fuller, Willcox and Allaby in World Archaeology), since they knew how to manage vegetation through burning and to plant and transplant if desired (as indicated by bottlegourds that must have been cultivated since the Pleistocene beyond Africa) rice cultivation is fundamentally different-- the management for habitats for annual plants rather than landscapes of perennials. A key shift in rice is from perennial ancestors to more productive annuals, a point he touches on as well. And the creation of rice cultivation systems that could select for this and for domestication traits like non-shattering was fundamentally different in outcome and commitment than whatever landscape and tree management that had come before.

Crawford flirts with the Hayden hypothesis that rice cultivation developed because rice was the first luxury food. While the prestige of risking labour in rice probably is relevant to many cases of secondary adoption, as Huw Barton suggests for rice cultivation in sago-rich Borneo, I am less convinces this is true for the for the sparse early Holocene/terminal Pleistocene Neolithic of Yangtze China. Instead domesticated rice, and its intensified use (from ca. 4500-4000 BC onwards) correlated with material culture evidence from craft specialization and artefactual prestige-goods (see Fuller and Qin 2010). Hayden's speculation (in the recent volume edited by Barker & Jakowski) would be that competitive feasting and prestige battles are there to be found and we just need to keep looking (perhaps in submerged coastal areas which Crawford suggests may hold many secrets). I prefer to focus on the evidence we do have rather than speculate about what is under the sea or alluvium. Domesticated rice, in the morphological sense, was later than had long been assumed, and created new opportunities for wealth production and demography: it was a game changer, at least in its native Yangtze heartland. Morphological domestication and how rice was cultivated is not an unimportant detail, but central to understanding a major economic and landscape transition which made later Neolithic societies onwards fundamentally different from those that had existed for much longer before in the Early Holocene or Pleistocene... In any case, clearly a paper that deserves reading and thinking about.

Obscure crops of 2011 and an obscure book

2012-01-11T16:40:00.002Z

I am ever the fan of the obscure crop, the "lost crop", or the highly local. I have drawn attention previously to the forgotten oil-millet of Taiwan, and tef-- which is obscure to those less familiar with Ethiopian agriculture-- a couple of years ago. I thought it might be interesting as part of a end of 2011 review, to compile some of the more obscure crops that got archaeobotanical attention in publications this past year.

1. Abutilon theophrasti, socalled "China jute" or velvetleaf, was reported in quantity from a Hungarian Late Neolithic site in a storage jar (5th millenium BC) by Medovic and Hovrath. This is the only archaeological evidence for its cultivation that I know of, and it highlights the mystery surrounding where this crop comes from. This species can grown for bast fibre, similar to jute, but fruits and seeds are also edible. This find tend to lend support to the hypothesis of an eastern Mediterranean origin rather than an in China with early dispersal to Europe before 4000 BC.

2. Argan (Argania spinosa)-- the argan oil tree (or "goat-turd oil" as I have often heard it called), has its first(?) archaeological record from Southern Morocco, published by Marie-Pierre Ruas Margareta Tengberg & al. in Vegetation History and Archaeobotany. They also provide an excellent ethnographical description (and photos) of the gathering and processing: fruit eaten by goats; stones cleaned out of goat droppings, and pressed for oil... one of the priciest oils out there (if not the most pricey). Hunting for unadulterated bottles of the stuff was a recurrent theme in the markets of Fez or Meknes when I was on excavation in Morocco some years ago. Even small 50mL bottles, when you can find them, in London can set you back nearly 10 pounds. But its is a wonderfully distictive oil for salad dressing for, better, bread-dipping...

But for those into obscure and lost crops, a nice obscure book is Threatened Crop Sepcies Diversity by Korous Khoshbakht and Karl Hammer (a prolific researcher on crop diversity!). Actually published in 2010, in Tehran by Shahid Behesti University Press, it is unlikely to turn up in your local book store (but there is a PDF to be found from an Iranian site). I was lucky enough to find one with a Christmas card from Prof. Hammer in my post a few weeks ago, a real holiday treat. What a gem, with short account on obscure wheats, from Triticum karamyschevii, to forgotten millets such as Digitaria sanguinalis, to farmer preserved plants such as the banana relative Musella lasiocarpa, which is apparently now extinct in the wild, but it remains in cultivation as a raw fibre material and pig fodder by ethnic minorities like the Yi. Moringa hildbrantii, an endemic of Madagascar, appear to survive only in hedges and planted fences as an ornamental and medicinal. It includes nice summaries of the extinct Silphium of ancient Libya, or the more recent extirpated domesticated forms of German Pellitory (Anacyclus officinarum) grown in parts of Europe, such as Germany, as a medicinal up to the 19th century, but apparently now extinct in its domesticated form, but survived by it likely wild progenitor A. pyrethrum.

Nevertheless, other obscure and endangered crops are missing (such as the oil-millet of Taiwan or Khasi hills millet, Digitaria cruciata, or South Indian browntop millet, Brachiaria ramosa). Also missing are some of the archaeobotanically well-known lost crops, the striate emmeroid wheat of prehistoric Europe, first published by Jones et al 2000, for example, or the Bronze Age Greek oilseed forms of Lallementia (Jones and Valamoti 2005), or the domesticated sumpweed of North America, Iva annua var. macrocarpa, extinct from the native cultivars of the midwest by the time serious European records became available, but clearly recognized archaeologically (e.g. Yarnell 1972).

Loss of diversity of cultivars is undoubtedly a tragedy of our time, but it also not entirely new, diversity of cultivars has been being gained and lost since agriculture began.

Olduvai plant fossils taphonomy

2011-12-30T18:47:00.000Z

Although it is not, strickly speaking, archaeobotany I am interested to note a recent palaeobotanical study on Olduvai Gorge, which provides a new additional line of evidence on the environmental mosaic in which early hominins (Australopithecus etc.) lived published on-line for Quaternery International by Marion Bamford. Perhaps no surprise that it points to a dry savanna type environment with localized wetlands and apparent wet-dry cycles over the long-term. The interest in the paper, which does not even attempt identification beyond monocoit vs. dicot, however is in it taphonomic approach to how fibrous monocots (sedges, grasses, culms and rhizomes) versus woody dicots weather in the open air versus in water before the fossilizing deposition. There are some principles of wider applicability to plant remains of other period I suspect, and some of the systematic differences between waterlogged versus desiccated archaeobotanical remains relating to plant parts and states of preservation.

Some on-line sources on Indian forest/ forestry history

2011-12-30T17:26:00.001Z

Just a few links I have been coming across to some of the old classics on Indian forestry, especially during the 19th century. More and more primary material is coming on-line! My own version of how this fits together with a broader history of plant ecology and vegetation classification can be found as Chapter 2 in Asouti & Fuller Trees and Woodlands in South India (2008 US edition; 2010 Indian edition).

Hugh Cleghorn's Forest's and Gardens of South India (1861) is available from google ebooks or the internet archive. As it's title even implies this book does not make an idealistic distinction between natural forests and human used/managed woods, but treats both together under subjects like shifting cultivation firewood and charcoal production, and teak plantations although it was not conceived and written as coherent book but collects various shorter reports and letters as well as appendices of 19th century forest rules, etc. Cleghorn's discussion of shifting cultivation (kumri) drew upon the earlier descriptions from Buchanan's 1807 Journey from Madras through the countries of Mysore, Canara and Malabar also available for download. (For a longterm perspective on shifting cultivation in India, see the recent article with my student Ellie Kingwell-Banham for Quaternary International.)

Deitrich Brandis' Illustrations for the Flora of North-west and Central India (1874 London) includes about 70 illustrations [on-line or as PDF]

Cleghorn and Brandis were the foresters who first established forest conservation guidelines for British India which in turn were fairly influential on conservation approaches throughout the empire on the development of forestry as a scientific discipline. See this web article on the colonial origins scientific forestry.

VS Rao's (1961) history 100 Years of Indian Forestry is free on the Internet Archive.

JD Hooker's (1855) Introductory essay on Flora indica which includes the first real overview of climatic and vegetation zones in the subcontinent.

Concatenating rice and language phylogenies: a recipe for single origins?

2011-12-21T03:46:00.002Z

The literature has been and remains split on singular or multiple origins for rice. The discussion of whether or not all Asian rice can be traced to a single domestication event and a single cultural origin of cultivation continues, and there have been major arguments in favour of it this past year including the high profile genetic modelling paper by Molina et al published in PNAS in May, and a recent contribution on the historical linguistics front. I remain in favour of multiple origins [as per the "rice consilience" paper of last year] -- at least in terms of multiple starts of cultivation of wild rice even if not all of these starts lead on real domestication (in morpholoigcal adaptation terms) or to rice lineages still with us today. Increasingly I am coming to think that modern time-plane sampling, such as modern germplasm or modern minority language vocabularies, is biased by missing out on past diversity-- extinct landraces and wild progenitor populations, lost language diversity. Less diversity sampled will surely tend towards simpler historical reconstructions. Both disciplines also have a predilection for simplifying relationships as trees, which tend to favour single origins. Is there a sense in which genetics and historical linguistics together will tend to be biased towards identifying single points of origin? If so, then when there is evidence to contrary it should surely be given extra weight. A clearly there is an important role for archaeology to try to reclaim some of the lost diversity of the past.

Linguistic homeland for rice?

The new article on "the ethnolinguistic identity of the domesticators of Asian rice" has been published linguist George Van Driem, one of the foremost experts of Himilayan languages many highly obscure and dwindling, especially of the Tibeto-Burman language family has made numerous stabs at the contentious prize of correlating rice agricultural dispersal with historical linguistics, and its inferred history of population movements. In general it provides useful overview of the Austroastiatic and Hmong-Mien reconstruction relating rice and arguments about the homelands of these reconstructed proto-languages. Most archaeologists are probably more familiar with the hypotheses of Peter Bellwood and Charles Higham focused mainly on the Austronesian and Austroasiatic languages in Southeast Asia. (For two recent summary papers by Bellwood, from 2011, see Current Anthropology and the journal Rice). However, there has been considerable recent debate over how Sino-Tibetan (or Tibeto-Burman) languages fit in. The French Linguist Laurent Sagart, an the the instigator of a recent Cornell conference on the rice and language, has argued in recent years for a shared ancestry of Sino-Tibetan and Austronesian, with an outward migration of rice and millet (Setaria) farmers from central-Eastern China. Van Driem tends to have more of an emphasis on Southwest China through Assam/Burma as a focal area, although he also postulates southwards migrations of early Hmong-Mien speakers-- likely domesticators of rice (perhaps along the Middle Yangtze). Domestication of rice by Austroasiatic speakers could have been separate although he seems to tend towards wanting a single origin. As for these Austroasiatic domesticators he places them somewhere like Assam-- "the Northern Bay of Bengal littoral" (but I presume he does not intend of coastally adapted culture?). In this article Van Driem points to the recent Molina paper as simplifying matters of rice origins, allowing for early cultivation in India to be dismissed. In general the Molina paper and the earlier Londo et al (2006) map are used to suggest a northern Southeast Asia/NE Indian focus for rice domestication, while archaeology is cited mainly for failure to have worked in the required areas. While I would be the first to argue that we need archaeobotanical sampling across Southern China, Burma and Assam I think this paper put too much stock on modern time place samples (languages and genes) and lacks a full engagement with the material constraints that archaeology already provides-- good dates for a domestication process in the Yangtze, good dates for when cereal agriculture, fully formed, arrived in Thailand or Sichuan (e.g. recent blog). These make a dispersal into the Yangtze from a single origin elsewhere impossible, and a dispersal of early rice use into India unlikely (although later introduction of domestication genes is another matter). I do regard as plausible, even likely that there was a separate domestication pathway in the unsampled area, perhaps associated with Austroasiatic, but this must have been in addition to what was happening in the Yangtze and the Ganges. There is a likelihood to would related to the aus-rices-- a group not incorporated in the Molina et al model.

Maps based on modern/recent distributions are a recurrent weakness in the paper. Modern wild rices, like those mapped following Londo et al (or Sampled by Molina et al) are of course biased towards the more tropical South as wild rices are not extant in most of the Yangtze nor in eastern China, but this is a product of environmental change both climatic and anthropogenic-- the extirpated wild rices of the Lower Yangtze, Huai, southern Shandong are of course missing from modern sampling, but archaeobotany has the potential (and is) putting this on the map. Much of the paper considers the linguistic paleontology for the homeland of Austroasiatic, in the case of the latter providing a series of maps of fauna that reconstruct to Proto-Austroasiatic, which point towards a southeast Asian (or Southernmost China) distribution. While these provide an important starting point they are also biased towards modern geography rather than early/middle Holocene geography. To take two examples consider water buffalo and elephants, both mapped as going as far north as southern fringes of the Yangtze. But both are species that we know used to range into and north of the Yellow River valley at least through the Bronze Age (i.e. until perhaps 1500-1000BC). Hoffpauir's (2000) excellent chapter on the Water Buffalo in the Cambridge World History of Food provides a good map while a more schematic map occurs in my 2007 paper on non-human genetics, agricultural origins and linguistics in South Asia [pdf]. As for the elephant its former northern occurrence apparently even for Shang royal elephant hunts, provides the leitmotif and title for an excellent long-term environmental history of China,

Mark Elvin's The Retreat of the Elephants. Compare Van Driem's map (top/left) and Elvin's retreat map (lower/right)

[note added 30 Dec. 2011: I have just come across the study by Li et al. (in press in Quaternary International) which has identified Early-Middle Holocene and Bronze Age "elephants" of northern China as the extinct Palaeoloxodon straight-tusked elephants rather than modern Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) but the point still stands since either could the be referent of an early etymon.

As for the genetic single origin (of Molina et al.)

Molina et al (2011a) carried out analysis of demographic history by attempting to model demographic parameters from several phylogenetic datasets using the new generation of collascent models (BEAST and DADI) which allow for multiple branches, bottlenecks and populations. This represents an important step away from single bottleneck models (e.g. Zhu et al 2007; Zhang et al 2009) which only attempted to estimate the correlation between early population size and length of the domestication (bottleneck period) of a single hypothetical origin. They conclude that single domestication of japonica is likely with indica derived from a subsequent bottleneck (underlying grey image below left), their discussion later hedges this with raising the importance of hybridzation/ introgression in indica, although the headline that most take away from this paper is still the idea of a single origin, single domestication event. However origin (start of cultivation) and domestication may not be the same thing.

This study, however, does not sway me from my conclusion about the evidence for a proto-indica exploited in India before the introduction and hybridization with improved japonica, but reinforces the need for a fossil record. They are unable to sample and model the full range of diversity in all the lineages that have ever been cultivated, however briefly, over the past 8000 years. Their work focused on nuclear genetics, undoubtedly the most informative about evolutionary history in general, but they over overlooked the chloroplast. The chloroplast, which is maternally inherited, differs fundamentally between indica and japonica, nivara and rufipogon, such that there are shared characters between indica and nivara which differ with those of japonica and rufipogon, while other characters in indica are unknown in the wild. This set of chloroplast relationships is indicated in the color overlay in Figure. While they conclude that introgression, which I take to mean pollen flow, from wild rice (into the crop) in India might account for some of the genetic diversity in indica not seen in japonica, it cannot account for the chloroplast diversity, since chloroplasts are not carried in pollen. Thus pollen from wild Indian rices introduced to japonica is insufficient explanation. Instead one would have to posit pollen flow from crops into wild populations (with some nivara-related traits and some now extirpated traits) and that those wild populations retained domestication traits and were subsequently brought back into cultivation. Instead it seems still easier to posit proto-indica cultivation into which cultivated japonica , with a suite of valuable domestication traits, was brought into contact. The genetic background was largely indica into which japonica was the source of introgression, i.e. pollen flow. I also worry the discernment between their alternative models is not very clear; comparing visually the differences in predicted outputs and actual data (Figure S4 of Molina et a 2011a) it is hard to see much of a dramatic difference between either predictions or fit. In the end I worry that they are forcing us to choose a false dichotomy between common ancestry and gene flow for explaining similarities between indica and japonica, and favouring shared ancestry on the basis an averaged phylogenetic tree across several datasets which may favour a single origin for domesticates much as is true of the neighbour-joining analysis of neutral genetic variation (Allaby et al 2008 or Allaby et al 2010 ).

Something that can certainly be remedied in the next round of models is the exclusion of temperate japonica, which was excluded from the sample set of Molina et al. As we see in the spread of rice in China, it enters the temperate zone of North China already by 3800 BC (based on a direct AMS at Nanjiaokou), where the short-grained is already evident. Based on environment and grain morphology then, we can infer the temperate japonica evolved (through its own post-domestication bottleneck) quite early. It is also from this region (the Yellow River) that diffusion westwards to central Asia and Northwest India is most likely. Therefore I would envision an early form of temperate japonica making the first hybrids with proto-indica. The sequence of bottlenecks associated with rice dispersal event was surely more than two, and some of these may have been associated with quite strong selection pressures (such as for or against photoperiodicity) as rice adapted to new ecologies: just two bottlenecks is unrealistic.

Nevertheless Molina et al provide what probably a more realistic molecular clock estimate than has been possible before, with an initial domestication placed at 8200 BP (upto 13000), and the indica bottleneck at ca. 3900 BP. The former fits quite well with current archaeobotanical evidence for the beginnings of morphological change in Yangtze rice, and the later date is spot on for the first appearance of the “Chinese horizon” in Pakistan and Northwest India. If this study is taken as representing the main stream of fully domesticated rice then it seems to be closing on elements of reality.

I would regard many of the problems identified above as conceptually relevant to historical linguistic hypotheses. Linguistic reconstructions inevitably work backwards from a modern time plane (although some may benefit from old texts too), towards a reconstructed common ancestor. This is like the domestication bottleneck in that while its form may be inferred from the modern data (given certain simplifying assumptions), lost side lineages, may be overlooked, and shared ancestry may therefore be easier to see than parallel developments. The dominance of the single japonica narrative found by Molina et al. (2011a) is much like the dominant Austronesian paradigm in its downplaying of substrates and language levelling processes. Indeed, recent perspectives on the later history of Southeast Asia, such as James Scott's (2009) The Art of Not Being Governed, have emphasized that ethnic affiliation has been flexible and that disgruntled overtaxed rice farmers have recurrently taken to the hills and joined the shifting-cultivator tribes, switching identity and language (at least for the past 1000 years). This is probably one factor contributing to the remarkable typological convergence across Southeast Asian language families and this may obscure early history. I find this conceptually similar to the observation that over time domesticated crop varieties come to resemble each other more than any resemble wild progenitor populations, leading to false ascertainment of monophyly (Allaby et al 2008; 2010).

. . .
My own working hypotheses on how rice phylogenetics and especially historical linguistics can be fit together within the framework of evidential constraints provided by archaeobotanical evidence, should be published soon in a special issue of the journal Rice [on-line here] arising from the Cornell conference....let the discussion continue and may it inspire new archaeobotanical sampling and genetic modelling.

From domestication to Global Warming: the Early Rice Project in Archaeology International

2011-12-19T10:30:00.000Z

2012 is the 75th anniversary of the founding of the London Institute of Archaeology (which is now part of UCL), and semi-popular journal Archaeology International has just launched a bumper double in honour of this. This also marks a reformatting of the journal and launch of an on-line edition, which is fully open access. In addition back issues are now available digitally for free, the three most recent are on-line already, and other should follow. This issue includes retrospectives from former students who have gone on to other lines of work and fame, retrospectives on past members of staff (e.g. the recently deceased John Evans), an introduction to our new satellite campus in Qatar, as well as article reporting on a small selection of research projects, from Neolithic Catal Hoyuk to Anglo-Saxon political landscapes, from the 14th century capital of Mali (Sorotomo) to early silverworking in the Andes. It also includes a summary of my Earl Rice Project (Fuller and Alison Weisskopf) including an up to date summary of rice domestication evidence from China, and our phytolith assemblage approach to reconstructing rice cultivation systems, which Alison in pioneering.

Here is our abstract:

The Early Rice Project, at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, is clarifying the origins of Asian rice agriculture. In the Lower Yangtze region of China, we have found the tipping point when domesticated forms first outnumber wild types c.4600 BC. Investigations of assorted weed flora are also revealing how the cultivation of rice changed over time, with early cultivation in small, irregular, dug-out paddy fields in the Lower Yangtze from c.4000 BC, providing a means for the careful control of water conditions. We also work on early rice cultivation in Thailand and India. By better characterising how rice was cultivated across its entire range, we aim to model the ancient output of atmospheric methane from wet rice fields, as this was a potential contributor to the long story of human-caused global warming

The article and PDF are open access: here

De-centering the fertile crescent

2011-12-09T17:41:00.002Z

The Near Eastern "fertile crescent" is the classic centre of origin for domesticated plants. Although when James Breasted coined the term (1906) he was thinking about the beginnings of agrarian civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia. The term become subsequently linked to Gordon Childe's notion (1935) of the "Neolithic Revolution" and with Vavilov's "centres of origin" idea, and the Fertile Crescent became, in archaeological argot, the centre of agricultural origins par excellence. In another classic paradigm-setting paper Jack Harlan used the Fertile Crescent as representative of a "centre" of origin, a focused area in which a package of crops was domesticated together, opposed to his notion of a "non-centre" of diffuse origins of crops that were not-packaged and spread out in domestications in space and time, of which the sub-Saharan savannah was perhaps the classic Harlanian exemplar. Within "centres" the Neolithic was meant to be a revolution, domestication rapid, and hunter-gatherers transformed to village farmers in one process. However, the evidence for this has been gradually unravelling for the Near East, with domestication-- the evolution of domestication syndrome traits in crops-- taking place quite slowly (3000-4000 years), and taking place not in a focused area, as a package of crops, but spread out and with as many dead-end proto-domesticates as paths into the crops and farming systems we know for later prehistory or history. In other words, there was no Neolithic Revolution as such but evolutionary processes, in the slow Darwinian sense, in which many incremental changes and transformations only added up to something revolutionary in retrospect, after millennia (some 150 to 200 human generations) of small steps.

You can find the case for this made in the December World Archaeology in my joint paper with George Willcox and Robin Allaby "Cultivation and domestication had multiple origins: arguments against the core area hypothesis for the origins of agriculture in the Near East" which is a companion piece with our in press paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany "Early agricultural pathways: moving outside the ‘core area’ hypothesis in Southwest Asia". Both are responses precipitated by publication late last year by Abbo et al. of a re-iteration of the "core area" view of a tightly focused area where a single package of "founder crops" was domesticated rapidly. Such a view requires the assumption that archaeobotanical evidence is false fossil record, a poor reflection of actual domestication processes, i.e. that the gradual changes that appear in systematic archaeobotanical evidence, are somehow misleading or mistaken. I find this hard to accept-- perhaps because I am a practicing archaeobotanist and regard the preserved grains and rachises of prehistoric crops as our most material record of what these plants were like and how they were used in the past-- but also because recent years have seen increasing sampling and sample size and it is the increase in these data, and the detail with which they have been studied, that most points to the more gradual evolutionary processes. In addition, the "core area" view delimits a smaller number of founder crops and sets aside (or even rejects implicitly) the presence of past cultivars and domesticates now extinct, from the Abu Hureyra rye, 2-grained einkorn, the "new type" emmer ('striate emmeroid'), or the Gilgal oats-- all species which are the product of careful efforts of archaeobotanists to document the material remains of past crops and not to assume that all crops that ever were must still exist today. These constitute the "lost crops" of the Fertile Crescent just as much as Iva annua is a lost crop of the American midwest. Coupled with the genetics of known crops that support multiple "domestication pathways" (such as in barley, emmer, pea, probably one-grained einkorn), the Fertile Crescent as a whole was host to something like 20 domestication "events," only a fraction of which can be localized in any one sub-area of the Fertile Crescent or can be expected to be present in modern germplasm collections. With this number of domestications and their diffuse nature across the Near East, the Fertile Crescent as a whole starts to look like a Harlanian "non-centre". On the level of individual crops and domestication events there may well be many centres of origins but in terms of regions it look increasingly like all were non-centres. The closer one looks for a core centre, the blurrier it becomes.

Last year I declared in General Anthropology, a paradigm shift in agricultural origins research. Perhaps rather pretentious, but it remains the case that domestication appears to be a slower process as we gather more evidence, and there is evidence for more places of domestication around the world (North America, South India, separate North and South China, various parts of Africa, New Guinea, to name a few). This year I have put my money where my mouth is, and brought out a number of contributions looking at domestication processes in the Near East in particular and in comparison to the best documented crops from elsewhere (mainly in the Old World). This includes attempting to objectively calculate rates of domestication in terms of phenotypic units, the darwin and haldane, reported in terms of more general conclusions-- that domestication was slow and not somehow special compared to other forms of evolution-- in the journal Evolution (Purugganan and Fuller), and unpacked with more consideration of the variation across crops in the Near East and elsewhere in Vegetation History and Archaeobotany (Fuller, Asouti, Purugganan). See also the updated rachis data of Tanno and Willcox (2011)phenotypic change may differ in adjacent geographical contexts, and in particular that there appear to be in island effects on Cyprus, where grain size change was sped up (Lucas, Colledge, Simmons & Fuller). A careful consideration of the hard evidence, such as the essay assaying the southern Levant (Asouti & Fuller), shows that even for the Fertile Crescent we still lack the evidence we need to be clear about domestication processes in particular micro-regions, early cultivation or when agriculture emerged (keeping in mind that cultivation, domestication and agriculture are really different things from among the many transitions that gradually came together). We also note that there is alot more work to be done on the species that were important wild food stuffs, which were abandoned as cereal agriculture took off, the small-seeded grasses and legumes, wild nuts and nutlets-- evidence in other new archaeobotanical datasets such as that from Jordan (el-Hemmeh) of White et al. (which reports important evidence for how barley was harvested prior to domestication) or 3 sites from the northern and eastern Fertile Crescent (SE Turkey and Iran) of Riehl et al.. Of course as the role of many wild foods along side pre-domesticated cereals gains recognition, the difficulty of being clear what was a likely weed as opposed to gathered become acute-- an issue discussed in a short paper by Willcox on early weeds. Another recent paper out of London (Wollstonecroft, Hroudova, Hillman & Fuller on Bolboschoenus) illustrates an example of challenges that still confront archaeobotanical identification, and the the potential ecological and dietary implications of refining these to species level, in this case for the sedge Bolboschoenus glaucus.

Most of these papers, now available on-line for a forthcoming Vegetation History and Archaeobotany issue on the Near East which will illustrate the revised (and more diverse) understanding of the precursors of Fertile Crescent agriculture: the tides seem to have turned on the simpler core area paradigm!

More on rice and millet in South China and Southeast Asia

2011-12-06T16:57:00.000Z

Some new publications highlight new research and new researchers working on the archaeobotany of parts of China and Southeast Asia. Three recent papers all from among a new generation of archaeobotanists report and review evidence for archaeological rice and foxtail millet (Setaria italica) in the parts of China and in Thailand. Recently published in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, is a paper by Nasu et al. on "Land use change for rice and millet at Chengtoushan" a Daxi era (4500-4000 BC) site in Hunan province. This reports in detail the weed flora, mainly indicative of wet rice cultivation (on , as well as discussion of probable rainfed foxtail millet, the earliest South of its probably northern Chinese areas of origin, as well as plausible Perilla and melon (Cucumis melo) cultivation. Two papers have also appeared in the journal Rice from a conference on agriculture and language-spread held at Cornell in September, both by PhD students. One by Jade Guedes, who is carrying out new primary archaeobotanical research in Sichuan province, reviews "Millets, Rice, Social Complexity, and the Spread of Agriculture to the Chengdu Plain and Southwest China." The other, by one my PhD students at UCL, Cristina Castillo, reviews the archaeobotanical record from Thailand: "Rice in Thailand: The Archaeobotanical Contribution". Both also discuss weed flora, including evidence for wet rice cultivation in the case of the Chengdu Bronze Age and dry, rainfed rice in the case of Iron Age southern Thailand.

Soybean archaeobotany: multiple origins and not coincident with cereals

2011-12-06T16:24:00.000Z

A important paper on Soybean domestication (subtitle "Does size matter?") was published last month in PLOSone by G-A. Lee, Gary Crawford and colleagues. This reports details on the morphometrics of more than 900 archaeological soybeans across 22 sites in (northern) China, South Korea and Japan, including 7 directly dated by AMS. This provides the first really good archaeological dataset for making inferences about soybean domestication, and includes a summary of the soybean metrics from Wangchenggang published in a Chinese monograph in 2007 by Zhao Zhijun (and in more detail his 2010 book collection) , previously suggested to indicate some size increase by the Longshan period (i.e. 2500-1900 BC). The data reported here suggests large, truly domesticated soybeans present in middle Jomon Japan Shimoyakebe (near Tokyo), from the Third Millennium BC. These are significantly larger than those from the Yellow River valley oif similar age, the Longshan period, which are also probably enlarged by selection under cultivation (at least the population from Wangchengang appear enlarged while some other Longshan samples still fall in the wild type range). In Korea a measured population form the Middle Chulmun is perhaps marginally enlarged while those of the later Mumum had clearly undergone selection for size increase. The overall impression that selection for seed size increase in soybeans was a protracted process and one that was uneven in different regions, and it may be that in some areas wild population continued to be exploited or proximity of wild populations and early cultivation methods did not lends themselves to selecting for larger seed size. This then complements data emerging from several crops for a protracted process of evolution of domestication traits (see previous, for example my articles in Annals of Botany or Evolution, and for a discussion of protracted domestication processes in the New World tropics see the recent Current Anthropology by Piperno). It also strongly points to a Jomon domestication independent from that in northern China, and one in which seed size evolved more quickly. While genetic publications present a cacophony of single versus multiple domestication models for the soybean, those favouring a single genetic origin tend to rely on genome-wide-markers and simple tree-building, or bottleneck models, e.g. Guo et al 2010 (which has been shown to be problematic, e.g. by Allaby et al. 2008 and 2010), and those favouring multiple origins, including a separate Japanese origin seem more realistic and have support from chloroplast polymorphisms, e.g. Abe et al 2002; Xu et al 2002).

For those looking for generalizations about agricultural origins, East Asian soybean has long been taken as an east Asian equivalent of the pulses and beans of Near Eastern, as the legume component of cereal-legume package of early agriculture. Proponents of a single centered origin of agriculture in the northern Fertile Crescent of the Near East, for example Abbo et al (2010), point to the overlap zone of wild wheats, barley, lentil, pea, chickpea, as the core area of domestication in part on the assumption that this package of crops must have originated together. I am among those who disagree (e.g. in World Archaeology or J. of Experimental Botany), and see this as a package that came together piecemeal and gradually. In East Asia, there is now systematic archaeobotany that points to no initial linkage between soybean and early cultivated millets of the north nor rice of the Yangtze. Soybean were a later addition, gathered wild by some and cultivated by some some, perhaps not much earlier than the third millennium BC.

See also this news piece from the University of Oregon. See also the excellent overview on Korean archaeobotany by Lee in a recent Current Anthropology, which also has reviews on Japan by Crawford, and China by Zhao Zhijun.

International Workshop for African Archaeobotany

2011-11-18T13:09:00.000Z

The 7th international workshop for African Archaeobotany, and important small gathering every 3 years, now has a website for its next meeting, next summer in Vienna. Looking forward to it.

Korean seed atlas discovered

2011-11-18T12:54:00.000Z

Not sure how long this has been available but new to me is the on-line seed Atlas of Korean wild plants, which should be of use for in generally for archaeobotanical work in East Asia.

New online Phytolith reference collection

2011-10-28T12:16:00.000+01:00

A new searchable database of l phytoliths images has been made available by the Barcelona lab GEPEG (Research Group for Palaeocological and Geoarchaeological Studies). Find it here: GEPEG phytolith database. I have not had a chance to explore it in detail, but it will doubtless prove useful. It has about 185 images in it, so it by no means comprehensive, and it includes archaeological as well as modern reference material. (And it reminds me that our UCL phytolith on-line gallery needs updating, as I have let in languish for a few years without additions).

Recognizing immature millets

2011-10-10T00:19:00.001+01:00

Recently published on-line is an highly significant, but rather unassuming paper, about variation in millet grains due to immaturity. Motuzaite-Matuzeviciute et al from the Cambridge archaeobotany lab report on "Experimental approaches to understanding variation in grain size in Panicum miliaceum" in Vegetation History and Archaeobotany. One of the major conclusions is that immature grains are likely to preserve archaeologically and contribute small grains to samples, and their recognition is important for archaeobotanical interpretation. This study vindicates the recognition and quantification of immature millet grains, indeed both immature Setaria italica and Panicum miliaceum have been recognized and reported from recent work in China (starting from Fuller and Zhang (2007)'s report on Ying valley survey samples [pdf from here], although it did not provide adequate illustrations). Immature grains have often is overlooked or lumped with other small grasses, such as Digitaria sp. as indeterminate "panicoids". Examples can be found in illustrated reports, such as the the two at the right, in which the modern grain at the top is a 8-day-old grain from the new Motuzaite-Matuzeviciute paper and the other two are from Huizui and the Yiluo reports (published by Lee et al in Indo-Pacific Prehistory Bulletin and PNAS in 2007). I do not mean here to single out any lab as worse than any other, all or most archaeobotanists were failing to deal adequately with highly immature millet grains-- indeed I suspect I need to go back through samples from Neolithic South India sorted during my PhD to check for mis-counted immature Brachiaria ramosa grains. The important this is for practice to change. Immature grains are important for the recognition of crop-processing stages in millets (as discussed in Fuller and Zhang 2007). In addition, a shift from more to less immature grains harvested might be expected to take place with domestication, much as was the case with rice, i.e. morphologically wild panicles needed to be targeted on average more green to avoid grain loss to shattering. (This issue I raised in relation to rice domestication a few years ago, for example in Antiquity 2007).

Early Agriculture & Anthropogenic Climate

2011-06-15T09:23:00.000+01:00

A quick note on the publication of the updated rice archaeology database and a model effort based on it examining the spread of rice with an attempt to test its hypothesized contribution to rising global methane levels between 3000 BC and 1000 AD. This was a team effort involving students and post-docs with Early Rice Project (Kingwell-Banham; Castillo; Weisskop; Qin Ling) collaborators from abroad (Sato (Kyoto); Hijmans (David)) and some nice GIS modelling work by Jacob van Etten (Madrid). Some maps wet rice distirbution in selected time-slices are shown left; but for more details read the paper. This article "The contribution of rice agriculture and livestock pastoralism to prehistoric methane levels" is available ahead-of-print on-line from The Holocene. Our key conclusion is that by 1000 AD perhaps 80% of 'anomalous' methane could be attributed to rice cultivation but also at 2000 BC rice is still not that significant and other sources should be sought such as the rapid spread of pastoralism around this period especially through the savannas of Africa and South Asia.

I have previously blogged the rice-part of the Ruddiman (Early Anthropogenic) hypothesis i.e. that early rice framing (and its spread) contributed enough extra methane to the atmosphere to make a global impact from sometime just after 3000 BC. I did raise some questions about the quality of the data: how many early rice finds actually represent cultivated rice (not wild) and how many represent flooded or paddyfield rice rather than upland rainfed rice? Also what role did the spread of cattle pastoralism over the Old World play in contributing to Mid-Holocene methane levels? So this new paper is an attempt to address some of these questions. We make a first stab at mapping the areas over which pastoralism spread in addition to modelling the spread of rice and the land area under wet rice cultivation. For rice at least we are able to estimate methane output but further work is needed for an equivalent calculation from cattle. I think we also would all admit that our estimate from rice remains imperfect and there is a lot of additional work to do! Collecting better quality archaeobotany (and more of); more zooarchaeology; and more sophisticated modelling...

A recent summary of the Early Anthropogenic Greenhouse Gas hypothesis has been published on-line by Bill Ruddiman at realclimate.org. It has attracted a lot of discussion. Essentially this provides a preview to some of the results due out in the August issue of the journal The Holocene (although many of the paper are already available on-line). This issue has also received attention in Nature in their News section (in March) and was one of the issue debated at the AGU Chapman conference in Santa Fe in March.

Short rice: another domestication trait (for Early Japonica)

2011-06-09T06:43:00.000+01:00

New genetics work on rice from a Japanese team indicates that the mutations SD-EQ1, which makes rice plants shorter, was strongly selected early on in the process of rice domestication, at least within the japonica sub-species, which is presumed to be that domesticated in the Neolithic Yangtze. This article bu Matsuoka et al, published in PNAS, has been highlighted in Science magazine's on-line news. A transcript of my full comments and initial thoughts, are provided here.

This study by Asano et al on the SD1 gene, which shows strong selection for shorter rice plants in domesticated japonica, adds to a growing list of genetic evidence for the different origins of indica and japonica rices and for the differing cultural ecologies in which these crops were first cultivated. Subsequent hybridizations transferred some domestication-selected genes, but selectively from japonica to indica, probably around 3800-4000 years ago (see, e.g. Fuller & al. 2010, Archaeological & Anthropological Sciences). Deductions from the modern ecology of wild rice varieties and archaeobotanical evidence (e.g. Fuller & Qin 2009; p. 147 in Fuller & Qin 2010) points to a important role for human manipulation of the water conditions of early japonica rice cultivated in China with necessary adaptations in the growth habit of rice and shift towards a more annual seasonal pattern as opposed to the wild-type perennial pattern. Wild O. rufipogon is a perennial, which prefers growing in more less permanent water or areas that only dry up for short periods. It can produce extremely tall, long culms in order to grow in deeper water, While deeper water reduced competition from other plants it also reduced productivity since growth is focused on vegetation tissues (leaves and culms), and as long as water conditions are fairly staple plants with reproduce vegetatively and produce few seeds. Early cultivation of rice in the Yangtze region of China clearly focused on wetlands margins (for example at Kuahuqiao, 6000-5400 BC, or Tianluoshan, 5000-4300 BC) in Zhejiang. The pollen and microcharcoal data from Kuahuqiao, published already by Zong et al 2007 (for further details see this 2009 paper) already indicated the manipulation of wetland margin environments by 5700-5400 BC. While these sites, especially the evidence from Tianluoshan (which we published in Science in 2009) indicates selection for non-shattering rices over this period, it also suggests a change in the ecology in which the rice was growing. Accompanying weed seeds indicate a shift away from a predominance of perennial, and taller, sedges (Cyperaceae) towards a wider diversity of shorter annual grasses and dicot weeds (summarized inFuller & Qin 2010, but only published in detail in Chinese this past month in a Tianluoshan monograph; English papers still to come!). This suggests that there were also developments for how (and where) rice was grown. This would have involved manipulating the soils and water depth in which rice was grown. One reason for this is that in order to promote annuality and higher seed production the rice plants need to water-starved, i.e. subjected to drought like conditions, when they are starting flowering: the drought conditions lead to increased grain output, a strategy that would be suitable for true drought but also would increase yields for early farmers. Thus more productive early rice required humans to create seasonal drought like conditions; genetic adaptations to these conditions would then be selected for.

Subsequent to Tianluoshan, at around 4200-3800 BC, other sites in the Lower Yangtze regions, such as Caoxieshan and Chuodun (see discussion in Fuller and Qin 2009), show increased human efforts at managing water levels in very small paddy fields some with adjacent channels and water 'storage pits', which would allow these small fields to be drained. Such systems would have strongly selected for changed in rice plant architecture towards less spreading grow habits (based on the gene Prog1, published in by Tan et al in Nature Genetics 2008; some discussion for the selection of this which is parallels in other cereals is provided in Fuller, Allaby and Stevens "Entanglements...", in World Archaeology). Shorter rice plants might also have been favoured here, if not already at the early wetland margin cultivation of Tianluoshan, since human manipulation of water would remove the need for taller plants, which would be prone to falling over (i.e. lodging) and would produce fewer grains (since metobolism was being invested in more culm rather than more seeds). An interesting question would be to know whether shorter plants (SD1) or less branching (Prog1) was selected first.

Once japonica was introdouced into areas with proto-indica, selection for these traits would be well-finished, and shorter growth habits may have been unnecessary and unattractive to South Asian cultivators. Thus in early India there was a selection process of crossing japonica to indica to acquire some, but not all, domestication related traits.

Journal Issue on Food Processing

2011-05-08T18:52:00.001+01:00

The latest issue of Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences (Volume 3(1)), is a themed issue on food processing studies in archaeobotany and ethnobotany. It has a range of case studies I can recommends, geographically from Argentina to Germany to Greece to Japan, and in age from the Palaeolithic to the European Iron Age and the South American Inka. This is definitely an important for archaeobotanical thinking and research, and it provides a framework that cuts across the usual divide between hunter-gatherers and farmers. The guest editors, Aylen Caparelli, Soutana Valamoti, and Michele Wollstonecroft deserved congratulations.

IN THIS ISSUE:

>>>Editorial: After the harvest: investigating the role of food processing in past human societies<<< Aylen Capparelli, Soultana Maria Valamoti & Michèle M. Wollstonecroft. [link]

>>>Staple or famine food?: ethnographic and archaeological approaches to nut processing in East Asian prehistory<<< Leo Aoi Hosoya [link]

>>>Ground cereal food preparations from Greece: the prehistory and modern survival of traditional Mediterranean ‘fast foods’<<< Soultana Maria Valamoti [Link]

>>>Early Iron Age and Late Mediaeval malt finds from Germany—attempts at reconstruction of early Celtic brewing and the taste of Celtic beer<<< Hans-Peter Stika [link]

>>>Traditional post-harvest processing to make quinoa grains (Chenopodium quinoa var. quinoa) apt for consumption in Northern Lipez (Potosí, Bolivia): ethnoarchaeological and archaeobotanical analyses<<< Laura M. López, Aylen Capparelli & Axel Emil Nielsen [link]

>>>Recognition of post-harvest processing of algarrobo (Prosopis spp.) as food from two sites of Northwestern Argentina: an ethnobotanical and experimental approach for desiccated macroremains<<< Aylen Capparelli & Verónica Lema [link]

>>>Elucidating post-harvest practices involved in the processing of algarrobo (Prosopis spp.) for food at El Shincal Inka site (Northwest Argentina): an experimental approach based on charred remains<<< Aylen Capparelli [Link]

>>>The possible influence of post-harvest objectives on Cucurbita maxima subspecies maxima and subspecies andreana evolution under cultivation at the Argentinean Northwest: an archaeological example<<< Verónica S. Lema [link]

>>>Investigating the role of food processing in human evolution: a niche construction approach<<< Michèle M. Wollstonecroft [link]

No more nano-diamonds

2011-05-08T04:08:00.001+01:00

As many know, in the last few years the Younger Dryas (or, Greenlanf Interstadial 1, if you prefer) has received quite a bit of attention as a potential mega-catastrophe, and impact of extraterrestrial asteroid, conveniently hitting the arctic ice sheet so as to not leave behind a crater, but nevertheless being alleged to have left behind nano-diamonds around the world, climate change and extinctions in its wake (and the origins of agriculture). It made the news in Nature [pdf], was written up in PNAS in 2007, and started a race to find archaeological and palaeoecological evidence of nano-diamonds. Doug Kennett came to London to search through the archive archaeobotanical samples from Abu Hureyra in hopes of finding some with sediment that might contain these alleged forensic evidence for the devastating impact. Well, this hypothesis, despite all the hype, has quite roundly and thoroughly dismantled, through numerous studies, but which are all drawn together in a nice "requiem" by Pinter, Scott, et al., in the recent issue of Earth Science Reviews (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2011.02.005). For more online summary see the discussion of this article on realclimate.org.

As an archaeologist interested in the Younger Dryas for its local impacts on ecosystems and cultural adpatations, this was only ever a distraction. That there was a climatic event remains clear, and we can return to looking critically at how this is reflected locally in archaeological and palaeoenvironmental evidence. Indeed, recent focused studies on Near Eastern archaeobotany have begun to question to relevance of the YD as the key event in the origins of agriculture. Did cultivation actually start in the YD at Abu Hureyra, or can patterns on the plant remains be more parsimoniously explained as shifts in foraging? For example, an detailed rethink of the nitty-gritty of the Abu Hureyra data, has been recently published by Sue Colledge & James Conolly in Environmental Archaeology, Dec 2010. As archaeobotanical evidence increasingly points towards a slow evolutionary process of domesticated plants in the Near East as elsewhere, and a dispersed process both in space and time around the fertile crescent, it makes less and less sense to see a few potential plots of cultivated rye in the Younger Dryas as somehow dictating the direction of all changes towards agriculture over the subsequent 3000-4000 years in the greater Near East. So we need to get back the work of looking at regional environmental impacts and cultural sequences.

(on the slow domestication in the Near East and elsewhere, one might have a look at these paper from the past year:
Purugganan & Fuller. Archaeological data reveal slow rates of evolution during plant domestication. Evolution 65(1) [2011]

Allaby, et al. (2010) A simulation of the effect of inbreeding on crop domestication genetics with comments on the integration of archaeobotany and genetics Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 19(2)

Fuller (2010) An Emerging Paradigm Shift in the Origins of Agriculture. General Anthropology 17 (2): 1, 8-12 [pdf])

[posted from Jinan, Shandong]

A bucket of water and a bag of dirt… « Ancient Egypt Research Associates

2011-02-27T10:13:00.001Z

Here is a cross-link to an archaeobotanical blog from Giza, by friend and colleague Mary Anne Murray

A bucket of water and a bag of dirt… « Ancient Egypt Research Associates

Whence the Indian Lotus?

2010-08-11T15:37:00.001+01:00

I just received a query about the native range of the Indian Sacred Lotus (Nelumbo nucifera), and whether it might have been introduced to India (e.g. by Indo-Europeans). Here are my thoughts

An introduction to India is not out of the question, but seems fairly unlikely. True there are no hard archaeobotanical finds of Nelumbo [formerly often Nelumbium] but this species is surprisingly rare archaeologically in any case. In favour of an ancient presence in South Asia is the linguistic evidence in Dravidian in which there are cognates in the South, South-Central and Central Dravidian subfamilies (see Dravidian Etymological Dictionary Revised entry 3163), which suggests an original term at a level as early as indigenous South Indian domesticates (Mungbean, horsegram) and many indigenous trees (teak, neem, etc.) [see Fuller 2007 pdf]. The absence of North Dravidian cognates is likely to be poor linguistics recording. These Dravidian, all something like #tamar, are presumably the source of Sanskrit tamarasa (unless one were to posit a shared, older substrate source for both). The true wild distribution is somewhat problematic because today this species is found largely in human-made or modified pools (tanks, etc), but this is to be expected as there are few natural ponds in much of India, where there have been quite dense agricultural populations for a few thousand years. Nelumbo is native in Iran and Southwest Russia, but also extends to East and Southeast Asia, New Guinea and bits of Australia, so a natural presence in India, at least through the Indo-Gangetic river systems seems likely. Archaeobotanically the only really early evidence for lotus that springs to mind is from China, where charred tuber fragments are found at the Neolithic site of Jiahu (7000-6000 BC), where is constitutes part of a aquatic resource package along side Trapa water chestnuts, rice (probably morphologically wild) (as well as wild resources like acorns). There is a brief summary and graph of the Jiahu data published recent in English by 'Jimmy' Zhao in Archaeological & Anthropological Sciences 2.

I would also note that the fossil record is not very informative about where something is native (in the sense of wild prior to human involvement). Of course Nelumbo is present in Tertiary and late Cretaceous India, as it is a very early ('primitive') dictotyledon group, near the base of the lineages that are nowadays called the Eudicots (characterized by tricolpate pollen, as well as genetic monophyly). Nelumbo is in its own family and places in the Proteales (see Angiosperm Phylogeny website). Nelumbanaceae type fossils go back to the Albian, ca. 110 million years, and their presence in Tertiary India is not surprising, as at that time the India subcontinent was an island (formerly of Godwanaland) that was rafting north and had not yet crashed into Asia. Tertiary India included lost of flora which did no persist into the Quaternary: Gunnera is one example that springs immediately to my mind! [see Fuller & Hickey Gunnera paper] Instead, a later Pleistocene and early Holocene fossil record is what is needed to determine where something in 'native'.

Global Human Ecology: Anthromes from Biomes

2010-07-23T12:05:00.001+01:00

A very interesting and important approach to mapping global vegetation but including the human activities has just come to my attention. It is the work of "Anthromes Project" of the Landscape Ecology laboratory at University of Maryand Geography Department, lead by Dr. Erle Ellis. Essential they are mapping landuse and vegetation together. Rather than traditional biome and vegetation mapping, which attempts to infer "potential vegetation" on the assumption that such maps represent the world as it would be if there were no humans present, they are explicitly mapping human environments, villages, rice fields, pastoral rangelands, as well as woodlands and 'wild' vegetation. Their results can be found on their website, and are discussed in a fascinating, if somewhat frightening, new paper "Anthropogenic transformation of biomes 1700 to 2000 [AD]" in Global Ecology and Biogeography. Essentially they demonstrate that the proportion of the earth's habitable surface (i.e. not under ice or ocean) has shifted from a majority wild to the majority human-managed and modified in the past 300 years. While we think of the world becoming increasingly urban, certainly true, it is the the expansion of inhabited villages that really stands out-- although as someone who has traveled across much of India and China, this is totally understandable, there is a vast number of sprawling small communities (often with populations in the many thousands) scattered across the landscape, and these are of course surrounded by crops (dry or irrigated), rice fields, and scrub vegetation used for grazing where "potential forests" ought to be. If the Neolithic is about the domestication of a few plants and animals, the plastic-age is about the domestication of the planet Earth.

As an archaeologist interested in past land use and vegetation, one is well aware of the need to factor in human activities in local environments (a point we tried to make in a little book on South Indian woodlands), and to keep in mind that people of have been playing with fire (literally) and modifying vegetation for a long time (at least 50,000 years in Southeast Asia and Australia, to judge by microcharcoal records of biomass burning). Agriculture, of course, represents a major transition in terms of intensifying modification and management of environments, but essentially much of that was still localized in a wider less modified background. The anthromes maps show clearly how precipitously the shift has occurred to a majority managed, modified and inhabited. As they conclude, it is clear that environmental research must focus on better modelling, predicting and managing human-centered ecologies, or as is noted in their blog the "war with nature" has already been won (for better or for worse) by culture, and we better deal with aftermath.

There is a conceptual parallel here with domestication. As seems increasingly clear to me, a key threshold is crossed when domesticated/human dependent crops (such as non-shattering rice) come to dominate the population, and the economy shifts to modifying the landscape and depending on domesticates. This is when agriculture emerges from early pre-domestication cultivation or small scale food production, and in many regional histories there is no going back to hunting-and-gathering after this. For better or worse people become 'trapped' and entangled in agriculture (see one recent exploration of this entanglement in World Archaeology)

Returning to the anthropogenic biosphere, archaeobotany has a role to play in putting an even longer term perspective on these changes in biomes/anthromes. By accessing evidence for earlier periods of human use and modification of landscapes and the construction of agricultural landscapes and economies, we see how current and recent trends compare with and are informed by a longer perspective.

Emmer wheat synthesis of genetics & archaeology

2010-07-22T09:30:00.000+01:00

Both genetics and archaeobotany provide vantage points of reconstructing the early history of crops, where and how they originates, and how they spread. There has been a growing recognition in both fields that some of our previous conclusions were false truths, based on simplistic assumptions. There has been a small, but growing trend, for some true interdisciplinary synthesis, of archaeobotanists teaming up with geneticists to write the history of crops, and a new example comes from the journal Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution, "Geographic distribution and domestication in wild emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccoides)" in which archaeobotanist George Willcox teams up with geneticists (including Ozkan, Salamini and Kilian) to provide an updated compilation of what is know about Emmer and what it might mean for multiple starts of cultivation, gradual domestication, but the possible predominance of one domesticated line at the end of the process. It generally points towards a much more complex picture genetically and biogeographically, and it recognizes the incompleteness of sampled datasets, including the range of modern emmer landraces and wild populations as representatives of what would have been there in the past. This paper hasn't solved all the mysteries of the origins of agriculture in the Near East, nor of emmer, but it represents serious progress through a conversation between archaeology and genetics, rather than just talking past each other.

Archaeobotanist honoured in Science

2010-07-22T09:12:00.000+01:00

It is not everyday that archaeobotany received much 'mainstream' attention. But recently it did: Science on 2 July 2010 includes a profile of Dolores Piperno, one of our fields seniors figures in phytolith work and a pioneer in applying starch grains to the archaeology of the Neotropics.

Divergence and gene-flow between the wild rices

2010-07-20T10:24:00.001+01:00

A important study has recently come out in the journal Molecular Ecology, on "Ecological divergence in the face of gene flow in two closely related Oryza species (Oryza rufipogon and O. nivara" by Zheng and Ge. In it they have sequenced a few chloroplast and nuclear DNA loci (7 in total) across 26 populations of these two wild rices. Nivara and rufipogon represent two ends of a adaptive spectrum in the wild genepool of Asian domesticated rice, with O. nivara being an annual adapted to seasonal water from the monsoon and lacking daylength seaonsality controls (so its life cycle is driven by water availability), while O. rufupogon sensu stricto is a perennial occurring in perennial wetlands, and is often highly structured in terms of the seasonality of seed set (especially important in its northern range in China). As I have discussed previously in a 2009 World Archaeology paper, these differing ecologies had important consequences for how these plants would have been utilized by hunter-gatherers, with the perennial rufipogon requiring more environmental manipulation to force it to produce more grain.

In this study Zheng and Ge show that these two wild rice ecotypes are well diverged overall, and they estimate a last common ancestor about 160,000 years ago, but they also show evidence for recurrent gene flow. This strongly suggests that these have diverged as ecological adaptations despite being in continued genetic contact, providing a nice case of the strength of natural selection in pushing divergence even when species ranges overlap (i.e. a case of sympatric speciation). It is interesting to note that the divergence time they have calculated is very similar that those calculated for the last common ancestor of indica and japonica domesticated rices, which have ranged in various studies between 86,000 and ~400,000 years ago, but most focus on 100,000-200,000, much like nivara and rufipogon. As many have argued (see for example the recent "Rice consilience" review article), indica and japonica appear to have different origins in cultivation from different maternal ancestors, one from a nivara-like annual and the other from Chinese rufipogon perennials-- although they also have undergone recurrent geneflow (see McNally et al 2009 on SNPs and hybridization), which has introduced selected domestication traits amongst others. Thus the process of differentiation in cultural ecologies in the rice crop, despite continued geneflow, continues that ecological and genetics dynamics of the wild progenitors.

Gansu Province survey archaeobotany

2010-07-09T09:08:00.000+01:00

A recent issue of the Chinese Science Bulletin contains an archaeobotanical paper from what appears to be a new archaeobotanical research group. An ChengBang et al. report evidence from survey archaeobotany in Qinan and Li counties, and as such follows in the path laid by flotation as part of field surveys published previously from the Yiluo Survey (Lee et al 2007) and the Ying Survey (Fuller and Zhang 2007; see also our GIS study in Journal of Archaeological Science). This new study is based on 96 samples, from something like about 40 sites (although this is not entirely clear). Unfortunately the full dataset is not published, and we are given a glimpse of it through summary data presented as bar chart of absolute counts of Panicum and Setaria grains. Not the most informative means of comparing across sites and periods with very different sample sizes. The presence of rice (7 grains in the Late Yangshao) and wheat and barley (from the Western Zhou period) are only referred to in the text description. No reference is made to any other species, whether pulses, fruits or weeds. One novel addition to the study was a stable carbon isotope study of the millet grains, which shows that Setaria tends to have a somewhat higher value than Panicum, as expected since although both are C4 plants they have different forms of the C4 mechanism. A novel technique but the results are still close enough that this is unlikely to replace morphological identification! While it is nice to see more archaeobotanical research being carried out in China, the attention to only cereals, the lack of discussion of archaeological context (it is even unclear which sites numbers are which period), a less helpful method of quantification, and the lack of full details makes this study a rather frustrating addition.

The arrival of wheat in China

2010-07-09T02:48:00.022+01:00

The extensive set of direct dates, on the largest early assemblage of wheat and barley in China, provides important new evidence on the arrival of West Asian crops, and western stimulus, into China. Rowan Flad, Li Suicheng, Wu Xiaohung and Jimmy Zhao, have recently reported new archaeobotanical evidence and AMS dates from the Gansu corridor site of Donhuishan in short article in The Holocene, "Early wheat in China: Results from new studies at Donghuishan in the Hexi Corridor." Importantly, the evidence includes the first large assemblage of wheat rachis remains. These provide the first clear confirmation of what has long been taken for granted, that the early wheat in China is only hexaploid bread wheat, leaving the eastern margins of tetraploid naked wheats (durum) somewhere in central Asia and to the south in India. This article also provides an updated review of all the early wheat finds that have been published from China.

In my version of their map (left), I have colour-coded wheat reports by broad period. First of all, it can be seen that finds line up along the eastern line of the classical silk road, running through the Gansu corridor and along the Lower Yellow river basin. It should noted that while the earliest finds are all attributed to 2500-2000 BC, or even more than 2500 BC in the case of Xishanping, none of these earliest finds is directly AMS dated. The case on Donghuishan reported by Flad et al., provides a warning call against putting too much faith in single or few or associated dates, as the earlier evidence from Donghuishan has suggested the wheat could be closer to 2500 BC rather than the 1600-1500 BC age indicated by numerous dates, including 4 directly on barley (but not wheat). Nevertheless it still seems plausible that wheat and barley entered China by ca. 2500 BC, even if the wheat crop did not take off until closer to 2000 BC. This period of arrival ion China is paralleled by the adoption from the west also of sheep, cattle and probably copper metallurgy (with a possible parallel spread to Southeast Asia-- as argued recently by Whyte and Hamilton). The counter current was provided by Chinese millets, as both Panicum miliaceum and probably Setaria italica arrive in northwestern India around this period, and Panicum is also reported in Yemen (ca. 2200 BC) and in Sudan by ca. 1700 BC. On the dispersal of westwards and southwards through the Indus to Arabia and Nubia, see discussion the paper "Cattle, Crops and Commensals" that I recently published with Nicole Boivin in the French periodical Etudes Ocean Indien [pdf]. I have also argued that japonica rice followed this route west from the Yellow river and in India (see discussion in my article in the recent rice issue of Archaeological and Anthropoloigical Sciences)

Interestingly the barley from Donghuishan, like that from Xishanping, is notable since most sites in China that have yielded wheat have lacked barley. This indicates that the adoption of wheat went through a strong cultural filter in which is was only wheat rather than wheat and barley that was adopted in much of central China. This provides a curious contrast from other regions of Asia, whether west Asia, central Asia of South Asia where wheat and barley are almost always found together archaeologically. In India these two winter cereals are also often found with evidence for pulses crops like lentils, peas or chickpeas. None of these Southwest Asia crops appears to have made it into prehistoric China. Thus the diffusion of crops into (and out of) China was selective process of cultural choice.

A dialog on rice in Indian cultural history

2010-07-08T11:10:00.010+01:00

I received the following queries about rice, posted on the Indo-Eurasian discussion list. Which I will endeavour to answer here. This queries arise from a colleague having read my recent “consilience” review article on rice.

- Does this new evidence (of proto-Indica and japonica entering fromChina via a precursor of the silk road) conclusively rule out the association of rice cultivation with a hypothetical 'Austric' package(I mean, dispersal of Munda-speakers INTO India)?

No. These processes are not mutually exclusively. The genetics of rice is complex and implies many episodes of hybridization between indica and japonica lineages, and with the aus and tropical japonica groups which are now increasingly seen of distinct subgroups of indica and japonica, respectively. Just have a look at the genomic data published by McNallay et al last year, and you will see how recurrent and extensive hybridization has been. A single entry of japonica into South Asia is inandequate, and we tried to reflect this in our ‘Thrust 10’, but there is also presumably some mixing between thrusts 6 and 8 in the Assam region. Indeed it is the aus-rices of Assam and Bangladesh that shows that highest levels of hybirdization in McNally’s study.

- Does this lend credence to the theories of South Asian homeland forAustroasiatic languages (including perhaps pre-proto-Munda and ancestral language of Mon-Khmer languages)?

No. The current archaeobotanical evidence can fit with Austroasiatic origins either to the East to the West. In my own writings I have gone back and forth from supporting the immigration ofMunda (my 2003 paper on Dravidian [pdf]) or emigration from pre-Proto-Munda (my 2007 paper in the Petraglia/Allchin volume). I have actually shifted back more towards seeing the Munda coming into India from the Northeast. In either case Proto-Munda agriculture was not particularly rice focused, indeed reconstructible rice vocabulary is meagre, but focused on tubers (including taro), millets (and it is unlcear if these are the Chinese or Indian millets originially), and pulses, water buffalo and maybe pig. It seems clear that Proto-Munda is heavily influenced by Dravidian and pre-existing Indian agriculture through the adoptions of sheep/goat, zebu, and Indian pulses. The archaeological and archaeobotanical evidence, however, is strongly against an “Austric” hypothesis (sensu Blust) that see one origin of rice driving all the major language expansions of SE Asia.

- With this new evidence, could we say anything about the familial affiliations of Language X and Harappan languages (Kubha-vipas and Melluha -- let's call them Language Y and Language Z; I personally don't like the terms like Para-Dravidian, Para-Munda, Para-IA etc.)?

No. I increasingly think that Para-Munda is highly misleading. Kubha-vipas seems to have as uch in common (in not more) with Mon-Khmer and even Austronesian as it does with Munda (this is clear from vocabulary comparisons used by Kuiper, which as Osada has pointed out often include Austronesian words; and from the “rising” versus “falling” order of the language (sensu Donegan and Stampe 2004). These might all be labelled as broadly “Austricoid” but I can not see how these can be connected with agriculture and presume that shared ancestry must be much older than that…. But this is probably a discussion for another time….

has a different history than that of rice, and agriculture predates the introduction of rice in all regions of civilization viz., Indus Valley, Gangetic plains, eastern India and Neolithic southern region of Andhra-Karnataka- Is it correct to assume that the dispersal of agriculture in India

The patterns are different in different regions: there is neither one story of agriculture in India (e.g. my Journal of World Prehistory paper of 2006 [pdf]), nor one story of rice in India. Agriculture clearly precedes rice in the northwest (the Indus), in the west (Gujarat and Rajasthan), in the northern and southern Deccan. Through most of the Indian savannahs (Gujarat through the South Deccan) early farming was based on indigenous millets and pulses, rice came late (mainly after 500 BC) and even in historic times rice was a relatively minor component of overall agriculture: I take this for example from my recent research on the archaeobotany at Paithan in Maharashtra—in the early Early Historic and Early Medieval period rice is presence but millets are dominant, and wheat and barley are also more frequent than rice. Of interest is that kodo millet (Paspalum scrobiculatum) is hand down the most dominant crop on the site, with the African millets including sorghum, which are so prominent today, making only a minor show. Agriculture and diet has been dynamic, and we do a dis-service to that variety by obsessing about rice. As explored in an interesting paper by Monica Smith (The Archaeology of Food Preference), rice does appear to have been a preferred crop of higher status and for culinary reasons, and probably also by states as it is highly productive and is therefore a favoured by state taxation. A similar point has been made compellingly in a recent history of political ecology and shifting cultivation in southeast Asia, James Scott’s book The Art of Not Being Governed—in which he explores how the lowland states of mainland Southeast Asia have always been built on fairly intensive, and easily taxable rice agriculture, while the unruly and difficult to govern peripheries have been the realm of shifting cultivators and those fleeing oppressive states.

ariki, arici (tamil), brinj (persian) etc. [as discussed in Witzel 2006. South Asian agricultural terms in Indo-Aryan, and Southworth 2005]?- What about the rice related terms like vrihi (vedic), vari (telugu),

Many of these terms probably are related, although I am less then convinced that all of them are. Some of the Dravidian terms look like they may be semantic shift from words that originally names of millet. But whatever the case the spread of rise and its rise in importance in economic and prestige terms means that names of rice would have been widely borrowed. Clearly the spread of rice into the Persian world came from India (although the preferred fragrant rice varieties of Persian had their ultimate genetic origins in Southeast Asia—as did most fragrant rices, as indicated by genetics of the most-common BADH2 mutation-- but must have moved via cultivation India). This could have been as much a process of elite dominance, in regions like much of South India where rice was initially a fairly minor crop, and have little to do with population movements as such. I would look to parallels in things like the spread, borrowing and diversification of terms of pepper in European and Western Indian Ocean languages—which testified to the long importance of this plant product in trade—it appears broadly related from Thai Phrikthiy, Swahili Pilipili (hence Brazilian periperi), Portuguese pimento, Turkish biber, Greek piperi, all ultimately from Sanskrit. Oddly from Sanskrit and not Tamil as black pepper is clearly indigenous to Southwest India. A similar pattern holds for names of coconut, far more prominent as a crop in Southern India than in the Sanskrit north. But these patterns must have some reflection of trade routes and social valuation. On the other hand most of the world has taken its names for Mango from Dravidian, yet the mango is not originally native there, but most cultivated mangos have their origins in Assam or thereabouts, but I know of no linguistic trail. Instead it was Tamil and/or Malay sailors who had borrowed from Tamil who did the most to spread knowledge of this fruit around the Indian Ocean. …I would note that putting together histories such as these and anchoring them in archaeobotanical evidence and genetics is a major focus of the Oxford based SEALINKS project, in which we have started new archaeobotanica sampling in Kerala, Sri Lanka, and coastal Kenya and Tanzania…

- Is it still correct to assume that the South Dravidian form 'arici' has been transmitted westwards, probably by maritime trade to result in Greek oryza, oryzon and Arab. ruz, English rice? You see, 'arici' is one of those words that compels people like Karunanidhi, the current CM of Tamil Nadu, to bombastically claim that "Tamil is the mother of all languages in the world!" (tamizh ulaga mozhigaá¸·ukkellaam taay mozhi ennum perumai peRukiRatu)!

Certainly the term for rice has been translated Westward from Tamil, but as the examples of pepper and mango indicate this has much to do with patterns of early historic trade, and which middlemen give commodities their name, than anything else, and perhaps little to do with ultimate ‘origins’ or Linguistic superiority. South India played a major role in Indian ocean trade throughout the 1st Millennium AD and upto the European colonial era, and thus many Tamil names have become attached to things; so too Portuguese and Spanish played the major role in transmitting the names of New World crops throughout Eurasia.

(These queries come from Suresh Kolichala, who is researching ancient Indian recipes and cookbooks, which I very much look forward to learning more about!)

Rice archaeobotany: new journal issue

2010-07-04T02:51:00.004+01:00

Archaeological & Anthropological Sciences volume 2(2), is a special issue on the topic of early rice agriculture in Asia. It brings together recent statements about the state of the art of rice archaeology in China, Korea, Thailand, and to a lesser extent Japan and India. It has articles on genetics, including the first published ancient DNA extraction targeting the occluded cell nuclei trapped with phytoliths (although admittedly from a remarkable context of preservation that included visible waterlogged leaves). One accomplishment is getting authors from Japan, China and Korea to publish all in one place in English. It also has a large review on the domestication process and spread of rice (see example of one map above), which comes out of a team effort, mostly here at the Institute in London. So if you want my latest views on early rice then you must read Consilience of genetics and archaeobotany in the entangled history of rice. [pdf] This includes domestication processes, and when they are finished in both India and China, how I think indica and japonica met (and hybridized) for the first time (in northwest India or Pakistan!), and when upland dry rice and paddyfield systems came to various parts of Asia. But for a taster of the volume as a whole it is, of course, worth starting with the short editorial. [pdf]

Archaeobotanical photo-sharing platform

2010-07-04T02:13:00.002+01:00

A couple of enterprising Harvard students have built a facebook of seeds, or rather a kind of networking platform for uploading images of archaeobotanical specimens, or reference materials. http://paleobot.org/

So you can see what others have found, identified or unknown, and have another venue for looking for matches for your own mystery seeds. Potentially a very useful resource, that is once archaeobotanists start to log in and upload. Time to sign up!

Book of plant histories in Europe

2010-07-04T01:54:00.001+01:00

Just a quick note, to record a link to a free, on-line book about plants in Europe (mainly Medieterranean and eastern Europe): Plants and Culture. Seeds of Cultural Heritage of Europe, edited by Jean-Paul Morel and Anna Maria Mercuri; the chapters or whole can be downloaded in PDF for free.

Drawing on historical sources and archaeobotany, various chapters deal with vegetables, fruits, gardens and recipes. Topics ranges from a history of peaches in Italy, to a detailed archaeobotanical consideration of Portulaca oleracea (purslane), to a reconstruction of food preparation (recipes) in prehistoric Greece, to renaissance era archaeobotany of Ferrera, Italy.

New Journal for Archaeological Sciences (& Archaeobotany !)

2010-05-22T15:16:00.002+01:00

We are now about two years into a new journal, Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, which published archaeobotany as well as a broad swathe of other scientific approaches and applications in archaeology. It about almost two years since the initial editorial board was signed up, and the first articles were published in early 2009. Our 6th issue is in production now for June, and will be a special issue on rice (some of the articles are already on-line first). It might be useful to draw attention to some of the other archaeobotany, already published over the past year. This goes back to issue 1:1,

(1) with an article by Walton Green on a novel, visual approach to apprehending and displaying multivariate archaeobotanical data;

(2) soil micromophological site formation process of a South African Palaeolithic case by Goldberg et al.-- but with evidence for non-food uses of plants and depositional processes.

(3) A methodological student on charcoal reflectance by MacParland et al.-- this is an exciting new approach to extracting a new kind of evidence from archaeological charcoal, namely the maximum temperature, and to some extent the range of temperatures, reached by charcoal in a past fire. This should allow one to judge the temperatures used in different pyrotechnic activities, and I suspect there is untapped potential to get at independent estimates of the temperature reached by carbonized grains, which might better allow us to correct for shrinkage when look at archaeobotanical seed metrics.

(4) A study of the archaeobotany and small fauna from late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Moli del Salt rock shelter by Ethel Allue et al. (2010),-- the evidence is mostly wood charcoal that indicates a mainly upland woodland was exploited for fuel, and a few seeds attest to gathering hawthorns, sloes and rosehips (not far off what we manage to gather with our undergraduate students each autumn on a trip down to Sussex), alongside a lot of hunting (or trapping) of rabbits, and fewer big game.

(5) Messager et al. (2010) report some even older seeds from the Lower Palaeolithic related site at Dmanisi, although it is not at all clear that Homo erectus/ergaster had anything to do with gathering these seeds.

(6) Weber et al. (2010) ask "Does size matter?" in this case is there some relationship between the grain size of crops (large grains like wheat or barley versus small grains of various millets) and the size of the settlements supported by those grains. They explore this through an overview of Harappan archaeobotany in which the an intriguing correlation between urban sites and dependence on large grains is indicated. An interesting approach to thinking comparatively and creatively over a wide region.

Keep archaeobotanical submissions coming. We aim to be eclectic in terms of region, period, type of plant remains (from phytoliths through charcoal), from shorter (and more speculative studies) to denser, more long-developed reviews.

More indicators of the early northern rice dispersal

2010-05-22T11:38:00.000+01:00

More evidence from the phytolith research group at the Chinese Institute of Geology in Beijing indicates that rice dispersal rapidly northwards from its presumed Yangzte origins into the temperate Yellow River Basin. Zhang et al (2010) report in a recent BOREAS article. phytolith sequences collected from scraped archaeological sections at Quanhu, Yangguanzhai and Anban, all Yangshao sites in the Wei river tributary to the Yellow River. All three sites start from the Middle Yangshao on cultural grounds, and sediment AMS dates support the start of these sequences from 3700-3500 BC. They continue through the Longshan and sometimes later. Rice bulliforms and double peak cells occur throughout the sequences, although it should be noted that broomcorn and foxtail millet husks occur too (applying the enhanced identification criteria developed in the same lab, famously applied at Cishan), and usually millet husks far outnumber rice husks indicating that millet cropping (dry farming) dominated over presumably wet rice.

These data need to be taken alongside other, even earlier indications, that rice spread northwards already in the Early Yangshao, by ca. 4000 BC. My colleague Arlene Rosen has explored the geoarchaeological evidence for rice cultivation from the Early Yangshao onwards in the Yiluo Valley in a recent Geomorphology article (2008). In addition, towards the end of last year we published the archaeobotanical evidence from Nanjiaokou (by Qin Ling & Dorian Fuller, in Chinese in the Nanjiaokou monograph, 2009). This includes some rice, alongside the millets, from early Yangshao levels dated between 4500 and 3800 BC, although the earliest direct AMS date on a rice grain was from end of this range, 3900-3800 BC. Still all of this indicates that rice diffused rapidly from the South (in the Daxi/ Later Majiabang horizon) as it came to be intensively cultivated (and was still undergoing population-wise morphological evolution of domestication syndrome traits: see Tianluoshan links), and was adopted into the expanding economies of Yangshao millet farmers.

New Indian Ocean Corridors Blog

2010-05-15T22:14:00.001+01:00

I must draw attention to new blog endeavour. This time a joint project, with an active and exciting network of scholars and research students working on different aspects of the Indian ocean and the inter-regional links between African, Arabia, India and beyond. The Ancient Indian Ocean Corridors blog, provide a forum for news and discussion of new research relevant to both the Palaeolithic and the Holocene ends of the pehistory the Indian Ocean region-- early modern human dispersals, Neolithic origins and dispersals, the exchange of domesticates between India and Africa, and research on trade (such as the spice trade) upto the Roman period (and even beyond).

Also just to note that I am back: as a busy teaching season wraps up, and after a couple of stints of fieldwork in Sri Lanka, India and China, I look forward to catching up on my archaeobotanical commentary....

the trouble with two-row barley

2009-12-22T11:41:00.001Z

I still seem to be playing blog catch-up, but I had to record something from a few months ago, which should be forcing us to think about the prehistory of barley in a whole new way. .. Palmer et al. of the Warwick molecular archaeobotany lab group of Robin Allaby published a major paper on plant ancient DNA in PLoSone this summer, "Archaeogenetic Evidence of Ancient Nubian Barley Evolution from Six to Two-Row Indicates Local Adaptation." On the one hand it has some nice clear ancient DNA results from the Nubian site of Qasr Ibrim, which allows these samples to be placed phylogenetically in relation to the gene the control whether barley is two-row or six-row. They have found what at first seems counter intuitive-- that all the barley samples have the six-row mutation, despite the fact that Nubian barley is usually regarded archaeologically as two-row, based on its symmetrical grains.

Cereal in Libya earlier than Egypt? New data from Huah Fteah

2009-12-18T18:25:00.007Z

The spread of agriculture to Egypt presents a number of contrasts from that in Europe of east of the Fertile Crescent. For one thing it seems to be long delayed, with our conventional dates for the earliest cereal agriculture in Egypt, such as in the Fayum at 5000-4500 BC-- by contrast cereal agriculture is established in Greece and Pakistan by 7000 BC. What is more Near Eastern animal domesticates (sheep and goat) had reached Egypt at least 1000-1500 years earlier and spread rapidly through the Sahara. New data from Libya, rather than the Nile, suggests a new wrinkle in this story: cereal agriculture did spread earlier (by 6000 BC?), and probably was established in part of the Nile Delta, but made little headway up the Nile. How have I come to this conclusion? [ed. June 2010: but see my own comment on the radiocarbon dates that have now overturned this]

In the latest issue of the journal Libyan Studies (vol. 40, 2009), there is a long preliminary report on the new Society for Libyan Studies/ Cambridge project at the famous Haua Fteah rock shelter, and thereabouts, the "The Cyrenaican Prehistory Projecy 2009" As part of this renewed work systematic archaeobotany is being carried out both at Haua and at nearby Hagfet al-Gama. Results from the macro-botanical work by Jacob Morales (normally based on the island of Gran Canaria) are presented over a few pages in Libyan Studies (pp. 83-88), and seem to be highly significant, if understated. Seeds are generally few and not surprisingly most are wild species. But of note is the the occurrence of barley grains and free-threshing tetraploid wheat (T. durum) rachis from the 2008 samples of Hagfet al-Gama. These are yet to be directly dated, but the cultural association is with the socalled Lybico-Capsian period, characterized by being non-ceramic and conventionally termed "Mesolithic". The Neolithic, in which older work identified domesticated sheep and goats along with ceramics, dates from ca. 5500 cal.BC-- based on the the latest radiocarbon dates. These finds from the Lybico-Capsian then suggest that domesticated cereals, deriving from the Near East, were already present somewhat earlier. Of course we must await more data, and direct dates; as well as results from new faunal analyses to see if any domestic fauna occurred alongside this pre-ceramic Libyan cereals... at present, however, we have tantalizing prospect of an earlier, hitherto undetected diffusion of cereals to northern (Mediterranean) Libyan, presumably over land via the Nile Delta-- where equivalent evidence is likely buried under meters of alluvium. Such a scenario makes the delayed diffusion of cereals into Middle or Upper Egypt and the Nile Valley all the more striking. In this region the 'Primary Pastoral Community' (sensu Wengrow) seems indeed to have been rather averse to cereal farming.

rice genetics watch: structure in Chinese rices but not domestication genes?

2009-11-04T01:11:00.006Z

In the Oct. 2009 issue of Theoretical and Applied Genetics, a large Chinese research group (Zhang et al.) looked Genetics structure among Chinese rice landraces, with over 3000 Chinese rice populations. They find clear population structure, not just between indica and japonica as expected, but also within each of these. Interesting they report that the structure in indica seems to relate to flowering time (early, middle or late flowering varieties), which suggests that early differentiation after indica originated may be focused on seasonality (and constraints of seasonal land and water availability). In the case of japonica (primarily temperate japonica one presumes), seasonality is pretty much always restricted to the warm wet summer, as China has dry, cool winters that are not conducive to rice. Instead structure seems to divide Chinese japonica landraces on the ground of soil and water adaptations, and whether they are best grown ion paddies or on upland rainfall. Indeed, as predicted from the archaeology the earliest ecological efforts in rice domestication in China are likely to have focused on water manipulation (see Fuller & Qin in World Archaeology), while early dispersal must have also seen diversification in rainfed and less labour intensive systems of cultivation. On the whole an interesting approach that one would like see extended beyond China.
Another paper also with Zhang et al. authorship (but a different Zhang), that came out at the end of the summer in New Phytologist looked in more detail at the phylogeny of sh4 and qsh1 non-shattering (domestication) genes, and provides a coallescent model of their origin in terms of fixation time. Their estimate this trait should have been fixed in ~100 years seems a throwback to the kind results that models produced a decade ago, now at odds with the archaeobotanical evidence on domestication rates. The authors are at odds to explain this by positing thhat the now universal(?) sh4 domestication gene evolved after initial domestication and then diffused throughout rice (and replaced some earlier domestication genes). Not a particular elegant, nor historically/archaeologically compelling model. I am forced to assume that something is amiss in the math or the assumptions of the model. Can an apparent rapid bottleneck be artefact of another process in the way the apparent monophyly can (as per Allaby et al 2008). I also note that the phylogeny that relate domesticated sh4 to wild populations the same or a close gene, on the surface suggests an origin of sh4 from a Lao rufipogon or an Indian nivara-- but surely these wild taxa, and the indica and japonica types deriving from them should not group together in a population phylogeny when they have different chloroplast genomes (with a common ancestor in excess of 70,000 years ago!). Of course a Neighbourjoining tree, however much bolster by bootstraps and Montecarlo methods is still just a cluster analysis that is not a particularly logical or robust way to look for phylogenetic relationships within a species that hybridizes. Thus the method employed here denies the reticulate evolution which is so clearly a part of evolutionary story of rice, as so elegantly argued in earlier papers by Sang & Ge or more robustly in the recent papers of Kovach et al or McNally et al. I am therefore provisionally not at all sure what this sh4 data is actually telling us.

Rice genetics watch: many sweet-smelling genes

2009-11-04T00:48:00.002Z

Although it is now a couple of months old, the paper by Kovach et al. (2009) in PNAS in August on the "Origin and Evolution of Fragrance in Rice" is an important contribution on the cultural history of rice. It is a clear example of selection by cultural preferences for rice that cooks a certain way, in this case with sweet or 'jasmine' aroma. Clearly many people from many cultural traditions have preferred their aromatic rices, whether Indian Basmati or Thai Jasmine rice, and this trait has been selected just as surely as ecological or domestication traits . But equally some people prefer otherwise, for their rice to smell of rice, which is true through Central China and much of east Asia.

While the responsible gene, BADH2, has been known for a while what is of interest here is that mutations in the sequence that produce fragrant rice have been distinguished and these have been tested over a very large diverse geographical sample. A single mutation is most widespread throughout regions with fragrant rice. It is clear that this originally from an early japonica lineage, presumably East Asian. And my inclination would be to see this evolving en route as Neolithic rice dispersed from S. China to SE Asia, (although it could be a later wave). But there are 9 additional more minor alternative mutations to the same gene to the same effect. They show clear geographical patterning, and the implication of that is this geographically separate groups have recurrently developed a preference for and selected for aromatic rices. It remains to be determined. Whether some of these were developed truly independently, with local fragrant mutations being kept or pushed to low frequency as the dominant BADH2 came in, or else these local aromatic variants were selected to mimick a preference developed after fragrant rice arrives. Of course the story may be different in different cases...

Au Revoir Levi-Strauss

2009-11-03T23:26:00.003Z

This blog returns, with a start, at the news that Claude Levi-Strauss died today. Startling because I hadn't even realized he was still alive! Although he probably hasn't influenced too many archaeobotanists, he certainly changed the way we think anthropologically about food, what is classed as edible, defined as cooked or rotten and how we refract much of what we mean to be cultural through a lens of cooking. In a general way, his brand linking cooking traditions to cultural cosmologies does run through the recently published (preliminary) study I wrote with Mike Rowlands on a "Macrogeography of Substances: Food & Sacrifice Traditions in East, West and South Asia" [pdf]. Levi-Strauss also plays the role of one of the characters (alongside the late Mary Douglas who lived and wrote to the ripe age of 86, less than Levi-Strauss' 100) interpreting archaeological feasts and human food sociality in Martin Jones' book Feast. As my tribute to Levi-Strauss I can think only to quote from one the myths he recounts on the origins of agriculture according to the Brazilian Munduruku:

In former times, game and cultivated plants were unknown to the Mundurucu.

They fed on wild tubers and tree fungi.

It was then that Karuebak, the mother of manoic, arrived and taught men the art of preparing it.

One day, she ordered her nephew to clear an area of forest, and she announced that soon bananas,

cotton, caras (Dioscorea), maize, the three varieties of manioc, watermelons, tobacco and cane

sugar would grow there. She ordered a ditch to be dug in the newly cleared area,

and asked to be buried in it. Care should be taken not to walk over her.

A few days later, Karuebak's nephew found that the plants listed by his aunt were growing on

the place where she lay; however, he inadvertantly walked on the hallowed ground, and

the plants at once stopped growing. This determined the size to which they have grown ever since.

A sorcerer, displeased at not having been informed of the miracle, caused the old woman to perish

in the hole where she lay. Since she was no longer there to advise them, the Indians

ate manikuera [manoic] raw, not knowing that this particular variety of manioc is poisonous

and emetic in that form. They all died, and next morning went up into the sky where they

became stars. Other Indians, who had eaten manikuera first raw and then cooked,

were transformed to honey flies. And those who licked the remains of the cooked manikuera

became the kind of bees which produce bitter, emetic honey..."

-- From Honey to Ashes, p. 56 (Levi-Strauss 1966)

Millets and Mistakes

2009-08-25T17:21:00.000+01:00

In Last week's Science the journalist Andrew Lawler, published an extended series of News Focus articles on Chinese civilization. The central piece focuses on the origins of civilization, highlighting for example the impressive urban settlement of Liangzhu (a kind of walled Neolithic Venice, many centuries before the Shang Dynasty) which ought to be better known to world archaeology than it is. (I had my own tour of some of the mutliple sites that compose it, and its multimedia museum, with site director Liu Bin in July). Also of note is his one page sidebar entitled "Go East, Young Archaeologist" on the specialists trained outside China, which features Jimmy Zhao, who has been instrumental in getting serious archaeobotany established in the minds and manners of Chinese archaeologists, and has been promoting flotation in China for the past decade.

What I would like to pursue here, however, are some observations on archaeobotany, and pick out some mistakes or misleading statements, with reference to the origins of millet agriculture which features in another sidebar, "Millets on the Move." Lawler begins which a point that seems to look increasingly true, that millet(s) were cultivated and presumably domesticated before rice, and were the staple foods of the northern China region where the classic Chinese civilization later emerged (focused on Erlitou rather than Liangzhu). He makes reference to the recent early dates (ca. 8000 BC) associated with Panicum miliaceum husk (lemma/palea) phytoliths reported from storage pits at Cishan (blogged previously). However, I must disagree the there is any hard evidence that the Panicum miliaceum at Cishan was morpholoigcally domesticated (i.e. non-shattering, with marked increased grain size, etc.), nor is there even clear evidence for cultivation, unless one assumes that large stores could only be ontained from cultivation, which in turn implies that we know the Early Holocene wild ecology of this species (which we don't) and that it did not form extensive collectible stands, as wild wheat, barley or rice or teosinte do (see discussion on my earlier Dadiwan blog and comment from L. Barton). I also must reiterate that there is much about the archaeology of the Cishan find (stratigraphiy, cultural context, and dating that require further work.

A lack of scientific clarity in Lawler's piece, however, is indicated in that millet is always used in the singular and the species (there are two major domesticates in ancient China) is never specified. And things get worse... as Lawler explored the hypothesis (favoured by Martin Jones and Cambridge millet group) that Panicum miliaceum (but NOT Setaria italica) spread before 5000 BC acroos temperate Eurasia from China to India. This hypothesis is plausible, but there is not yet any good clear data for this, only hints that it might yet emerge from ongoing and unpublished genetic work. Lawler acknowledges an alternative, which I would favour, that Panicum may have had a seperate domestication in the west somewhere near the Caspian and Black Seas. Well-dated, clearly-identified and numerically large assemblages of Panicum miliaceum outside China are mostly millenia later. To illustrate his case, Lawler produces a map which shows a major lapse in scientific clarity:

This map, although redrawn from that in Hunt et al (2008), is extremely mis-leading, especially when coupled with the text that hook-line-and-sinker swallows the notion that "millet" spread in the early Neolithic to Europe, without apparently realzing what "millet" is (or millets are). Millet is more than one species anyways despite the English misnomer-- in modern India one can find 12 domesticated species of "millet" in cultivation, with several more restrcted to Africa). The early dispersal of "millet" that Martin Jones favours, applies to broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum), as does the recent early find at Cishan, although Neolithic North China also boasts foxtail millet (Setaria italica), by about 6000 BC or so. For the map of Lawler, however, the "millet" in the caption actually means the genus Panicum or the genus Setaria, and does not require that these be cultivated or domesticated finds. What is most grevious in this map are the dots in Western Asia and Egypt. This map in its original, illustrated all reports identified to genus level of Setaria or Panicum-- both of which are major genera of grasses with multiple wild species-- in which the error margins of calibrated radiocarbon dates may place them as early as 5000 cal.BC (although often the dates are likely to be later). The dots in Western Asia, include sites such as Abu Hureyra in Syria, which is a well-known site to students of early wheat and barley agriculture. At this site it is argued (by Hillman et al. 2001) that wild rye and perhaps two-grained einkorn were brought into cultivation in the Late Pleistocene during the Younger Dryas, while later PPNB levels have evidence for domesticated wheats, barley and other Near Eastern crops. "Millet" is represented at this site by small number of wild Setaria, of either S. pumila or S. verticillata, and certainly not Setaria italica nor Panicum miliaceum. Other dots in Syria and Cyprus include Tell Mureybit, El Kowm, Bouqras, and Khirokhitia, which Lawler has now awarded domesticated Chinese millet in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. Meanwhile, three dots occur in Egypt, representing Early Holocene "Neolithic" sites like Nabta Playa. These sites are Neolithic in the sense of having pottery but not in having agriculture. Archaeobotanical evidence from these sites shows wild savannah grass gathering, including wild sorghum and a range of other species, including wild Panicum sp. and wild Setaria sp., but there is certainly no suggestion that these were cultivars or related to S. italica or P. miliaceum. While Hunt et al (2008: S6) were explicit in trying avoid the pitfall of "over representing.... securely identified domesticated finds", Lawler appears to have jumped headfirst into this pit!

The dot in Iran (representing Daulatabad R37) is also problematic as early millet finds there are more likely local wild species, while evidence for domesticated Panicum miliaceum is probably later form the latter Third Millennium BC at Tepe Yahya (a time period which fits with the reports of broomcorn millet appearing in Yemen before 2000 BC-- see the recent Boivin/Fuller review dealing with the prehistory of Arabia). A more detailed and critical look at the sites in Europe would show that these also include numerous Setaria sp. and some Panicum sp. reports that are of local wild species. In addition, quantities of reported Panicum miliaceum are extremely low and it remains entirely plausible that these represent wild, weedy Panicum miliaceum subsp. ruderale as a weed rather than domesticated broomcorn as a crop-- a point admitted in the Hunt, Jones, et al. paper from which the map derives (see page S14). Of course there is a bias towards focuing of wheats and barley in European archaeobotany, and careful documentation of the early Panicum has been less thorough. More archaeobotanical efforts are needed in this direction, like that being pursued by the Cambridge millet group, but dumbing-down for, and misleading, the educated readers of Science is not.

Rice genetics watch: another grain size and yield gene

2009-08-25T16:17:00.003+01:00

Shan et al. (2009) in Theoretical & Applied genetics report mapping of the gene spd6 which in wild O. rufipogon appeasr to reduced panicle size, grain number and grain size. This is likely to be yet another important gene that selection of early farming acted upon to increase yields (and grain sizes), along side genes such as qsw5, sw5, and gs3 that have been reported in recent years to affect grain size, and ghd7 and gn1a which affect p0anicle size and grain number. The new spd6 has been identified by a cross of a Hainan wild rice and the Chinese indica type, Teqing; it is not yet possible to draw any conclusions about the phylogenetic or geographical distributions of variants at this locus.

Tuareg Trade & Archaeobotany

2009-08-21T16:25:00.004+01:00

A new article in the latest Azania (in its new format), reports on the excavations at Tadmakka, in northeast Mali, carried out by Sam Nixon in recent years. These excavations of about 5 meters of stratigraphy produced a wide range of evidence for trans-Saharan trade between ca. 750 and 1400 AD, with a very significant cultural change, interpreted as 'Tuaregization' (a more Nomadic turn) from about 1300 AD. This article focuses on the material culture, the sequence, but includes summary comments on the animals and plant remains. Full details of the archaeobotany (carried out at UCL) are forthcoming.

This site provides the earliest significant evidence of trans-Saharan trade, including specifically gold trade and local gold coin production. Plant evidence also suggests a mixture of local crop-procduction, wild plant gathering and possible trade in grains; of particular interest is the evidence for free-threshing wheats-- but more on that when the archaeobotany is published. Some more information on the project is already available on-line here.

Locating American bean domestications

2009-08-13T13:09:00.007+01:00

A couple of recent papers of the UC Davis crops sciences group, continue the research tradition of Paul Gepts in providing further refinements in out undrerstanding of Phaeseolus vulgaris domestications, especially in terms of locating these two domestications and identifying closed related wild popualations.

Kwak and Gepts published in Theoretical & Applied Genetics 118 [March 2009] an open access paper on a phylogenetic and population structure analysis on wild and domesticated beans, reinforcing earlier inferences of separate Mesoamerica and SOuth American origins.

Further details on the Mesomaerican wild populations, their relationships and distributions, can be found in another paper by Kwak, Kami and Gepts (2009) The Putative Mesoamerican Domestication Center of Phaseolus vulgaris Is Located in the Lerma-Santiago Basin of Mexico, Crop Science 49: 554-563. This study concludes that Mexican beans did not originate in the Rio Balsas valley favoured for maize origins--and supported by recent archaeobotany work, but elsewhere in Southwest Mexico. This was on the News feeds of the Crop Society of America last week.

Review on lentil domestication

2009-08-13T12:55:00.005+01:00

A recent review article by Sonnante, Hammer and Pignone (2009) " From the cradle of agriculture a handful of lentils: History of domestication" in the rather obscure Rendiconti Lincei of April reviews the archaeology and genetics of Lentil domestication. It provides a useful overview, including a wide range of neutral genetic evidence that confers with the orthodoxy (e.g. of Zohary and Hopf) of a single Lentil domestication somewhere in the Levant, although the authors note the possibility that pre-domestication cultivation began with more than population of Lentils, but in the end only one was domesticated. They also provide a tabulation of the identified domestication-related genes in Lentil, which have generally received less attention than those in peas or Phaeseolus, and discussion of the morphological domestication syndrome in Lentils. They some speculation on why/how people came to cultivate lentils, which remains something of mystery for this and other pulses, in which seed germination rates of wild types are so low as to make them unlikely candidates for domestication. They concur the early Near Eastern agriculture including that of Lentils did not come from a dump-heap origin, but they still suggest that wild lentils might have occurred as weeds in early cereals and thus been a co-domesticate. Given what we know of wild lentil habitats this hypothesis seems little stronger than a dump-heap model, and I must favour some sort of intentional interest in Lentils and other pusles (perhaps for their protein content, or taste, or storability) which lead early cultivators to persist in their efforts despite initially low germination rates.

Rice genetics watch: SNPs confirm widespread hybridization events

2009-08-06T02:03:00.000+01:00

Published in PNAS last week was another major genetic study rice genetic diveristy, phylogenetics and genome structure. The study lead of Ken McNally at IRRI, entitled "Genomewide SNP variation reveals relationships among landraces and modern varieties of rice" once again confirmed the wide divergence between indica and japonica, as well as the rather distinct and intermediate position of the aus group of rices, adpated to dry cultivation Bangaldesh and thereabouts. Their summary phylogeny illustrated this clearly:

The dataset set size, in terms of numbers of accessions is quite small (20 selected varieties), but that it made of for this is the large coverage of the genome and the detail of genome structure revealed by its focus on single point mutations (Single Neuclotide Polymorphisms or SNPs). They covered 3.6 million base-pairs of sequence and discovered nearly 160,000 SNPs! In all of this the deep divergence of indica and japonica, which must precede the beginnings of cultivation was indicated. Even if morphological domestication traits are shared (such as the reduced shattereing of the sh4 mutation, or the Prog1 gene for erect growth) this must be attributed to much more recent hybridization probable since the start of management/cultivation. I favour a hypothesis of the introduction of introduce domesticated japonica to the Ganges or Indus where hybridization took place with unimproved proto-indica cultivars. (A key distinction here is between cultivation and domestication). Such a hypothesis, which can explain the genetics of domesticated rices is at odds with claims for an early Holocene rice domestication in the Ganges, e.g. at Lahuradewa, which does not fit with the genetic make-up of modern indica. But such early and important hybridization events were probably not the last.

The key conclusion of this study is that this is evidence for a large degree of hybridization between the different domestic rice clades, i.e, between indica and japonica, and between these and aus. This is an important conclusion, as it means we can not consider the long-term history of these rice lineages as separate but rather we must see them as entangled. With these lineages crossed (intentionally or unintentionally) over the millennia of cultivation to produce a greater range of varieties and adaptations. This may seem obvious but many (most?) prehistories of rice paint extremely simplistic (and unrealistic) pictures, whether one takes common archaeological accounts such as single origins linked to Austronesian or Austroasiatic expansions, or one takes some recent geneticist just-so stories of decreasing 'primitiveness' of rice varieties as one move north or west from Island SE Asia as indicative of an early (and stealth) origin somewhere in the Islands from which Chinese rice derived (e.g. as postulated in the recent Izawa et al. paper).

We can look forward to some future unravelling of the complex, entangled history of rice spreads and hybridizations.

This study got some on-line publicity, e.g. on ScienceDaily, but which seems to have missed the key point about how major hybridization has been in the evolutionary history of rice!

Where from the earliest Old World cotton?

2009-08-05T23:59:00.011+01:00

I have received a recent query about early cotton in Nubia and South Asia, vis-a-vis the early occurrence of apparent cotton fibres in plaster from Dhuweila in Jordan (published by Betts et al 1994, J. Archaeological Science). This came in response to discussion of the find in the recent review I co-wrote with Nicole Boivin on the Holocene prehistory of Arabia (including several discussions of crops). I reproduce here my emailed reply as to why I have not continued the possibility suggested by Betts (et al.) or a Nubia OR South Asian source. I have added links to references cited.

The Nubian source is based on reported cotton from Chalcolithic (A-Group) Nubia, first reported by Chowdhury & Buth in 1970 in Nature. The Indian Expedition to Nubia has preliminary reports on the archaeology in Indian Archaeology: A Review 1961-62 (which can be downloaded), and more extensively in Fouilles en Nubie (1961-1963). The A-Group Nubian cotton is problematic, with criticism published previously be me and by Zohary & Hopf. First it comes from goat dung, which does not necessarily indicate textile processing (admitted in the original Chowdhury publication). Second it comes from an undated excavation where it is alleged to be associated with A-Group ceramics (i.e. 3300-3100 BC-- mid-Third M. BC as cited by Betts [1994] is simply a mis-dating by the Indian archaeologists of 1962 who never got to grips with the Nubian sequence-- the dating of which was sorted out later, e.g. Trigger 1965; but especially Nordstrom 1972, Williams 1986; the region is largely depopulated at 2600 BC except for the Old Kingdom outpost at Buhen), but I am very worried that goat dung containing cotton seeds in Lower Nubia is more likely intrusive from later (Late Meroitic/Post-Meroitic) when cotton was known to be widely cultivated in the region. Stratigraphy in Nubia is always problematic. (I speak from experience in the 4th cataract), due to heavy deflation and reburial with windblown sand. For a published case-in-point consider Wadi Kubbaniya: Late Palaeolithic with charred wild plant remains AMS-dated to 16,000 bp and un-carbonized barley AMS'd at 500 bp [although not from the same excavation season] ! Things get mixed and the depth of deposit at Afyeh where it was found (the Indian Expedition to Nubia) was not very far beneath the surface. If it were from Nubia, how come there are no further cotton finds for 3000 years in the region? (Nevertheless, it would be nice to have more details about the Afyeh excavations, which remain largely unpublished and somewhere in the ASI archives in Delhi). I would note that Chowdhury also identified the Afyeh cotton as G. herbaceum based on a cross section of the seed coat. Perhaps this method works, but I have been unable to replicate it on the SEM (in modern material), which is a pity as it would be great to be able to track the two cotton species from archaeobotanical finds.

In addition, Naive African cotton, Gossypium herbaceum, is reported wild only much further south in Africa. It is of course possible it has gone extinct in Nubia, but if it were in 4th M. BC Nubia then it should on biogeographic grounds have been in Egypt too-- there is nothing in the Lower Nubian flora which is not in Egypt. (Is it likely the Egyptians would have overlooked using a species like this?). But, if one does postulate extinct wild Gossypium herbaceum as far north as Nubia then why not in mid-Holocene (wetter) Arabia as well?

Mehrgarh Period II has cotton seeds and fibres preserved in the earliest copper beads (Moulherat et al. 2004). On present evidence it seems the best, and only reasonable candidate. There can be presumed (but not proven) to come from Gossypium arboreum.

I must admit to remaining perplexed about the Dhuweila find. If textiles were traded long-distance one would not expect them to be valued, not used in tempering plaster. But perhaps this was not a common temper but a rare inclusion where someone tore a frayed tunic or something; the Dhuweila team got lucky-- one would need some systematic and quantitive approach to plaster temper to establish this.

My (obscure) article on Indian cotton and flax archaeology may be of some interest, as it reviews the archaeobotanical finds of these two species in India and Pakistan, with some notes on elsewhere [pdf]. For an updated review of cotton in Nubia see the chapter by Clapham and Rowley-Conwy in the recently published Hillman Feitschrit.

Gordon Hillman honoured with Feitschrift

2009-08-03T11:57:00.010+01:00

Yesterday, Gordon Hillman had some surprise visitors, Andy Fairbairn and Ehud Wiess (and I tagged along), who presented him with a feitschrift in his honour, published last week by Oxbow Books, Several years in writing, editing, and production the volume came as pleasant surprise to Gordon.

Gordon is pcitured here with the Feitschrift in his honour and the two editors, his former students Andy Fairbairn (University of Queensland) and Ehud Weiss (of Bar-Ilan University & the Weizmann Institute of Science). This book reflects the wide impact of Gordon's research, teaching and ideas both amongst colleagues (inlcuding junior colleagues like myself), but especially amongst his students, drawn from all over the world).

In typical fashion, Gordon offered us tea but suggested that first we ought to get out and collect some Deschampsia (D. caespitosa, the tufted hair-grass), as it was at the end of its ripening window (of less than 2 weeks or so). With his characteristic enthusiasm and eneregy we headed to Pevensey Marsh with baskets and seed beaters to have a short session at paddling up some spikelets from the extensive stand that grows in an under-grazed area of the marsh. (It has small red grains, not dissimilar from the Ethiopian crop tef in terms of size).

From Gordon Hillman 2 Aug 2009

There was more time spent sitting and eating some fruit (foraged by Andy & Ehud from a supermarket) than actually collecting, with conversation taking up issues of harvesting windows for wild grasses, acorn gathering, processing and tree ownership, seaweed collection and Australian Auracaria pinecones. Having caught up we headed back to Gordon's kitchen to dehusk and grind some Deschampsia and Festuca he had gathered earler in the week and dried. And some simple wild grass biscuits were griddle cooked to accompany our cup of tea.

It is inspiring to see Gordon still add it, regularly out in field and forest, gathering, experimenting with processing and eating. And, he is still working on a book that gathers all of this knowledge and experience on wild food plants together.

The feitschrift contents have been presented previously on this blog. The book can be ordered from Oxbow Books. A full tally of Gordon's published works (so far) can be found here.

Parallel origins: true modern human lithics in India (as true for agriculture)

2009-08-01T22:32:00.002+01:00

The latest publication from the Petraglia & Korisettar palaeolithic research team, working in South India, was published last week in PNAS—Population increase and environmental deterioration correspond with microlithic innovations in South Asia ca. 35,000 years ago. This study dovetails nicely with recent simulation modelling effort of some UCL colleagues (Adam Powell, Mark Thomas, and Stephen Shennan, director of the Institute of Archaeology), published in Science last month. (The appearance of these two papers close together is entirely coincidental). This simulations suggest that behavioural innovations, such as modern human behaviour, should be expected to emerge when circumstances are right (especially due to demographic factors of higher interactoing populations), and to be maintained only if demographic circumstances permit (and therefore disappear if populations decline).

These two studies together represent importance counters of an orthodoxy that sees ‘modern’ behaviour as emerging once, and therefore being a great invention when hard cognitive architecture came into place, perhaps even driven by a key genetic mutation for intelligence. Such is the orthodoxy implied by classic textbooks on human evolution, such as by Richard Klein (at least as was used when I was a student) or the recent reviews by Paul Mellars (e.g. his Science paper of 2006). In this view modern humans, heir cognitive abilities and the behavioural application of those abilities emerged once (in Africa) and spread out of Africa (once) to bring intelligent modern everywhere else (perhaps at sometime between 60,000 and 40,000—depending on whether one prefers to emphasize the earliest possible dates for Australia or the Upper Palaeolithic transition in Europe). The evidence from South Asia shows clearly that toolkits were middle Palaeolithic (and in this sense not ‘modern’) from >75,000 to 35,000 years ago, and yet genetics suggests that these would have been anatomically modern humans (and they must have moved through South Asia earlier than their arrival in Australia sometime between 60,000 and 50,000). The bottom line is there is a good evidential case to be made, congruent with the modelling of Powell et al., that the cognitive architecture for modern behaviour was around but the innovations that we regard as ‘modern’ emerged when social and environmental circumstances demanded.

There is a parallel here to where thinking on agricultural origins is moving. There has long been an orthodoxy that agriculture was a great and rare invention, and that agriculture came to most regions by the migration of farmers from a few centres of the influence of a good idea. In the more extreme cases, only 3 centres of origin (Mexico, Near East and China) are accepted. But the evidence of archaeobotany—where it is available—combined with the biography of wild progenitors, and where avail able the genetics of crops/livestock, suggest that there was many more centres in which societies converged on agriculture—the behavioural changes towards manipulation of the environment in favour of the reproduction of a few food species (domestication, the genetic sense, was an unintended consequence of these behavioural shifts, when the genetics of the species allowed). In my most recent attempt to sift through the combined data, I concluded that there is strong case for 24 separate instances of agricultural origins globally—although as many of these are poorly documented and geographically close together one might reduce this to 13, as per the map below from Purugganan & Fuller:

The point is that agriculture, like modern human behaviour, was not a one time great invention, but the product of social and environmental circumstances to which human groups with the same cognitive potential responded in parallel ways. The question in both cases is: what were the common denominators of those circumstances?

New e-volume on the origins & spread of bananas

2009-07-31T00:15:00.010+01:00

Just published is a special issue of the on-line, open access journal Ethnobotany Research and Applications, devoted to the "History of Banana Domestication". For those unfamiliar with the journal, it is worth watching, as it publishes a wide range of ethnobotanical papers, including several that have been relevant to studying crop origins and traditions of use. The journal is free, after one registers, and articles can be downloaed as PDF. This special banana issue arrises from a session at the Dublin World Archaeological congress. It starts on page 163 of Volume 7.

The contents are as follows:

Special Issue: History of Banana Domestication

Why Bananas Matter: An introduction to the history of banana domestication...Edmond De Langhe, Luc Vrydaghs, Pierre de Maret, Xavier Perrier, Tim Denham [link to this abstract]

Bananas and People in the Homeland of Genus Musa: Not just pretty fruit...Jean Kennedy

Combining Biological Approaches to Shed Light on the Evolution of Edible Bananas...Xavier Perrier

Differentiating the Volcaniform Phytoliths of Bananas: Musa acuminate...Luc Vrydaghs, Terry Ball, H. Volkaert, Ines van den Houwe, J. Manwaring, Edmond De Langhe

Relevance of Banana Seeds in Archaeology...Edmond De Langhe

Impressions of Banana Pseudostem in Iron Slag from Eastern Africa...Louise Iles

Banana (Musa spp.) Domestication in the Asia-Pacific Region: Linguistic and archaeobotanical perspectives...Mark Donohue & Tim Denham

Banana Cultivation in South Asia and East Asia: A review of the evidence from archaeology and linguistics...Dorian Q. Fuller & Marco Madella [download pdf]

Early Bananas in Africa: The state of the art...Katharina Neumann & Elisabeth Hildebrand

Bananas and Plantains in Africa: Re-interpreting the linguistic evidence...Roger Blench

Rice genetics watch

2009-06-30T10:47:00.007+01:00

A few notes on three recent additions to the library of publications of rice genetics.

1. Yamamoto et al (from Tusukuba) have publiished a review "Towards the Understanding of Complex Traits in Rice: Substantially or Superficially?" in DNA Research. This seems to be aimed at breeders and the potential of marker-assisted breeding, but it contains a useful compilation on a good range of QTLs for various domestication-related and post-domestication traits. It includes a schematic map with ~4000 qtls mapped onto the 12 chromosomes of rice, which just goes to show both how much information there is on rice, and how complex it is to understand the history of this crop when there is so much information. It is fair enough to say that most reviews have an inevitably partial view of evidence from the rice genome.

2. Panuad has published a short essay, ostensibly in honour of Darwin, on "The molecular bases of cereal domestication and the history of rice" in the French journal C. R. Biologies.It strikes me as neither particularly insightful nor up-to-date, but it is short and might of interest the less rice-savvy. Its limited reference to archaeology is rather disappointing and odd (a single Chinese article in the minor journal Nongye Kaogu), and the claim that we have less evidence from India as opposed to China because preservation is worse in tropics, is not really a fair assessment. True charred seed densities tend to be lower in India than China, but the main reason is that more Neolithic sites have been excavated in the Yangtze than in the Ganges. And even though flotation was started in India in the 1970s, perhaps 20years ahead of China, it is now being widely practiced in China as a rapid rate, whereas it is the the same 2 two labs doing flotation and analyses in India that started it in the 1970s (plus a couple of us occasional foreign visitors). Indian needs more sampling, and not to be written off as too tropical to work i, but needs more work, more workers, and more critical analysis and debate (e.g. about the nature of Lahuradewa's early rice).

3. The recent genetics paper I have seen that I am most impressed with is the study by Yamane et al (2009, in Rice) of the phylogenegentics of Hd6, one of the genes involved in regulating heading (flowering), and linked to response to photoperiod (daylength). It is clear that non-responsive plants have one of two alternate forms of the responsive (short-day) type, corresponding to two indica vs. japonica domestication pathways. It also suggests that a non-reponsive type found mainly in temperate japonica rices also derives from the wild and is found in some South Chinese wild rices. This story is entirely reminiscent of the case in barley recently brought to light by Huw Jones and colleagues.

Hunter-gatherers, farmers, and monumental storage

2009-06-29T09:29:00.007+01:00

Just a quick note of record of a new edited volume Interactions between Hunter-Gatherers and Farmers: from Prehistory to Present, edited by Ikeya, Ogawa and Mitchaell, was recently published in the series Senri Ethnological Studies by the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka [at the time blogging, this was not yet listed on their website]. The book is entirely in English, ands arises from a session at the WAC intercongress held in Japan in 2006. It includes a mix of studies from ethnographic (2 chapters on the Agta of the Philippines, and 2 chapters on Homng farmers and Mlabari (former) hunter-gatherers in northern Thailand) and archaeological (one on Southern African by Peter Mitchell, one on the spread of farming to Guangxi, China by Tracey Lu, and 3 on Japan, and one on the archaeology of Northeastern Luzon, Philippines, exploring the long-term development of a frontier of interaction between farmers and hunter-gatherers.

I certainly haven't read all of it yet, but I would note that the short chapter on Guangxi by Lu provides a useful brief overview of the Chronology of the main excavated Neolithic sites in southwest China, the evidence for rice, millets and foraging. The Chapter by Takahashi on interdependent relationships between late Jomon 'foragers' and Yayoi paddy farmers, provides some useful material including an updated map of some 29 sites with preserved paddyfield systems dating to this period. At the centre of the book is a nearly 100-page chapter by Leo Hosoya on the symbolism of grain stores and the emergence of hierarchy in the Yayoi period, with reference to artistic evidence, settlement plan, and crop-processing (from rice grains and spikelet bases), stone harvest knives, octopus traps, and more. A rich tapestry with much to digest and much that is suggestive of the potential role of monumentalization of storage in creation of a new kind of settled community-- perhaps there are some fruitful comparisons to be made to those first permanent granaries recently found in PPNA Jordan (blogged last week).

Nubia as world centre, c. 1900-1600 BC (and a note on millet)

2009-06-29T02:52:00.009+01:00

In the latest Norwegian Archaeological Review Hafsaas-Tsakos argues for seeing archaeological Kerma, what the Middle Kingdom Egyptians referred to as Kush, as shifting from a 'periphery' to a 'centre' in the world system at that time. (This article is not a particularly botanical one, but Nubia is always close to my heart, so how can I pass up a note on it.... for a botanical side to this note, read on). This argument is one that needs to be made, again (it has been made before by Stuart Tyson Smith). Kerma was probably the largest city in the Nile valley at its heyday (1700-1560 BC), and one of the great world cities at that time (particularly as the cities of the Indus and the Oxus had pretty much withered away by this date). The importance of Kerma a few centuries earlier is indicated by the large scale, and heavily fortified Egyptian military presence at the Second Cataract, indicated by the many Egyptian fortresses and their garrisons of the Middle Kingdom (this article includes a nice photo of one of the last, unsubmerged fortresses of Nubia at Shelfak). It seems odd that the author of this paper opines that the Egyptian presence was just about trade and did not involve control of Lower Nubia, as military towns and inscription attest to garrisons patrolling swathes of Lower Nubia (see, e.g. Joe Wegner's article in JARCE 32 (1995) 127-160)-- presumably to keep the natives in line and assure supply lines to and from Egypt. As is so often the case, economic administration and military control went hand-in-hand.

Unfortunately, this article says little about what commodities flowed from Kerma northward to make it such a centre, or what flowed from Kerma's periphery to Kerma. The importance of gold sources in the Third Cataract to Second Cataract stretch of the Nile and the Red Sea hills to the east are well-known, but I would like to flag some plant resources, of course. In her list of possible commodities, the authors notes incense. The importance of incense should be underscored. Incense was central to Egyptian temple ritual, its smoke literally helped to feed (and communicate with) the gods; and it was a required in the embalming of royal mummies. One of the forms of incense of 'ntyw, was likely frankincense or myrhh or a collective term for both. Egyptian sources indicate that this often came from the mysterious land of Punt but also flowed from Nubia. But the sources of true Frankincense (Boswellia) and myrrh (Commiphora) lie far away in Yemen, southern Oman and Somalia. Nubia was one of the point of contact then with poorly understand trades links to much further away. This centrality of incense goes back to the very beginnings of Egyptian written record, and probably before, even to the Predynastic period (see, e.g. some discussion in the recent book by David Wengrow). More than half a century ago, Henri Frankfort (The Birth of Civilization in the Ancient Near East) drew attention to the importance of incense to both early Egypt and Mesopotamia and he even speculated that traders from the two societies might have met and exchanged ideas of kingship and culture in the incense ports of Yemen-- rather a fantasy, but the importance of distantly imported incense is clear.

Hafsaas-Tsakos illustrates an imported Near Eastern juglet that probably contained fragrant olive oil or the like from a grave at Kerma period Ukma. The excavations at Ukma, published in the 1980s, provide the other tantalizing clue to Kerma's links to cultures to the east: finds of broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum), identified by the archaeobotanist Van Zeist (his short report in English on 'The Plant Remains' can be found in the french monograph by Vila). The importance of this lies in the fact that this species is absent from Egypt, the Levant and Mesopotamia at this time. This crop appeared in the Indus valley in the Late Harappan period, after 2000 BC (as part of a larger group of Chinese imports, see pg. 36 in my J. World Prehistory paper of 2006). There are possibly earlier finds of the mid-late Third Millennium BC reported from Yemen and eastern Iran (Tepe Yahya). Other Third Millennium find comes from further north in Central Asia. It is well-known that some African crops moved east, via sea, to India by, or just after 2000 BC; Panicum miliaceum is the one crop for which we have evidence that it moved the other way, in the world of Kerma/ Kush.

Hafsaas-Tsakos is right to put Kerma on the map of a Bronze Age world system, but such an expansion of the map needs to also include areas upstream that linked the upper Nile to Eritrea, Northern Ethiopia and the Red Sea, with its ties to the incense lands of Yemen and Dhofar. The millet from Kerma-age Ukma is the forensic clue that there were contacts, even if via down the line trade, between Kerma and these cultures to the East and South, in Yemen and to the Indo-Iranian region beyond (and from there ultimately to China where this Panicum crop originated (on its origins, see previous posts on Dadiwan and Cishan). Kerma was another centre but part of its importance lies in its links to these poorly-studied, maritime 'peripheries,' which in their own right were central to the flow of key-valued resources (like incense) with which new cultigens piggy-backed.

For more on the history & archaeology of Nubia, try this site from the expert Dr. David Edwards.

For a googlemap of many sites in Nubia, including Kerma (which you can see if you zoom in), try here.

Indian Archaeobotany watch: Lahuradewa 2008

2009-06-25T18:01:00.001+01:00

Critical comments on the archaeobotany of Lahuradewa. The Pragdhara volume 18 (for 2008) arrived in London in the first week of June. It constitutes a special issue on the Neolithic and agricultural origins, with various reviews on other parts of the world (some I was involved in writing), and for various parts of South Asia. Perhaps the centrepiece of the issue is the latest report on Lahuradewa, excavated by the Uttar Pradesh State Department of Archaeology, directed by Rakesh Tewari. This one article from the latest Pragdhara has been made available on-line here. I have been a disbeliever in print in the past on the rice from this site (see JWP 2006, and others). Not about whether it is an important site, nor the fact that it has the earliest finds of rice from South Asia (>6000 BC), nor the earliest pottery in South Asia-- demonstrably earlier than Mehrgarh Period 2, which starts from ca. 6000 BC. But I do not think, and I now doubt even more, that the rice was domesticated. It is not even clear that it was cultivated, and is plausibly (perhaps safest interepreted as) wild gathered.

They report three new radiocarbon dates on bulk charcoal samples, which calibrate to between 8000 and 9000 BC. This means that the 50cm or so of cultural stratigraphy now has to account for 5000 years, or more, of human occupation. One has to conclude that this occupation was unlikely to have been permanent and sedentary. Importantly, they also recovered more plant remains, including more rice from the lower levels (Period 1A). Details of numbers, densities and samples from flotation are not reported. New finds also include a large ceramic fragment tempered with rice husk, and apparently some rice grains, as well as carbonized grains and spikelets. They suggest that these are domesticated on the basis of three criteria, grain size and grain ratios (using what might be termed the ‘Vishnu-Mittre index’), husk patterns, and the alleged presence of non-shattering rachises (i.e. spikelet bases).

Spikelet bases. Lets start with the last observation first.

Clear criteria for distinguishing three categories of spikelet bases, one of which is definitely of domesticated type, have been recently published (Fuller et al. Science 2009; Fuller & Qin 2008), although these publications probably post-date when this report went to press. Nevertheless, earlier work by Gill Thompson (1996; 1997) provided clear illustration of the differences between typical wild and typical domesticated spikelet bases. There are four spikelet bases shown in their Figure 16, one which is shown in close-up (Fig 16.3: above) as an example of the non-shattering type. Its long rachilla is still attached, which is a trait occassionally (but rarely!) encountered in domesticated rice, and when it does occur it usual in East Asia rices that possess multiple non-shattering alleles and it seems most common in modern varieties adapted to machine harvesting. Rather the attached rachilla is typical of rice harvested immature and green. As noted in the Lower Yangzte and China generally, spikelet bases with protruding rachillae are common in the earlier Neolithic (e.g. at Kuahuqiao and Tianluoshan) but these forms decrease over time (see Fuller et al Science 2009 [follow the link from here]), until by ca. 2000 BC in Chinese sites they are very rare (<10%).

It should be noted that both of these represent spikelets that do not appear to have broken during dehusking, and that appear thin and deformed, and are likely immature (green spikelets), which did not contain fully-formed grains. These therefore look more like green-harvested, wild rice spikelets than the threshed remains of a domestic rice harvest! But these are illustrated as the best candidates of Lahuadewa "domesticates". What is more they both have preserved awn bases. While the loss of awns is not a definitive trait of domesticated rice (many varieties, especially of tropical japonica) are awned, the presence of awns is typical of wild rices. The pictures therefore do not agree with what is stated in the text, but quite the opposite.

What about husk patterns? The basis of using husk patterns to distinguish definitively between O. nivara, O. rufipogon and O. sativa has never been clearly demonstrated or published. Quite the contrary this seems to be a non-replicable, subjective judgement. The idea is that domesticated rice is nicely ordered with square cells, and wild rice is wild and disordered. There is perhaps more of the magic of metaphors than a real method here I suspect—in any case I have never been able to see this, and one can find exceptions to this in evefy box of wild or domesticated reference material. The original inspiration of this came from the work of T. T. Chang (and was then developed by Vishnu-Mittre and his students in Lucknow), and although Chang often assigned archaeological material on the basis of husk patterns, this relied on a kind of personal magic and authority and had always had to be taken on faith. Chang borrowed this method (which was termed the SUMP method-- Susuki’s Universal Micro-Printing) from the earlier work of Katayama (1969). In the original study it is determined that there are no significant differences among the species of the sativa-complex (including rufipogon) but only between these and other wild rices (non-AA genomes rices). [Katayama, T, 1969. Botanical studies in the genus Oryza I. Morphological and anatomical investigation of glume- and leaf surface with the SUMP and histological method. Memoirs of the Faculty of Agriculture Kagoshima University 7/1, 89-117.]

I suspect that there may be some tendencies of difference between wild and domesticated spikelets husks on a popualtional level, akin to the weak tendencies in husk phytolith form, all of which are probably linked to selection for larger, fatter grains. The husk patterns therefore should show trends of gradual change overtime as grains do, but until methods of measuring and quantifying this over time are developed, this is a non-method, and seems a leap of faith too far.

Grains. This report provides a table of grain measurements, on 26 grains (although judging by the photos I wonder if some of this included attached husk, which would elevate some measures and create greater variance). It should be noted that these are all Period 1A grains with no comparison provided to later periods. Thus there is no possibility of looking for the temporal trends that one expects with domestication. In any case it is clear from examining these measurements that they break into two size groups, one is small and the other larger. This is easily illustrated in the following chart.

The smaller-grained group is comparable to non-sativa small-grained rices (e.g. O. officinalis), while the other falls into a size range that could be domesticated rice. However, when length and width measurements are taken as a scatter plot, all of these grains fall within the range defined by modern O. rufipogon and (especially) O. nivara. None of them fall into the range of domesticated rice. In order words none of them is bigger than a baseline that might be defined on the basis of modern measurements. Both the large and small groups contain ‘Vishnu-Mittre indices’ that are >2 and ~1.7, which are alleged to distinguish domesticated and wild rices. Internally this data deconstructs the usefulness of this index as a marker of domestication. Modern measurements on populations of wild domesticated rice grains certainly do not bear these indices out!

The two populations are illustrated also by scatter plot, below, where the Lahuradeva specimens (light green) are plotted over the scatter of modern populations that were plotted in Fuller et al (2007, Antiqiuty; measurements by Emma Harvey). To compare the modern and ancient grains I have added a +10% increase to the archaeological specimens as a reasonable standard correction for charring. It can be seen that the Lahuradewa grains plots nicely with Oryza nivara, while the shorter grains plot with O. granulata and O. officinalis.

Because comparison with modern rice grains may be complicated by the charring factor, I have taken two archaeological populations from India for comparison as well. Both are Early Historic (perhaps ca. 200 BC, or so) and both come from regions beyond the range of wild rice. One is from a lense of charred grains at Terr, Maharashtra, and the other is from Balathal, Rajasthan. Both were measured in London, 300 grains each. As can be seen there is considerable variation (part of that is probably due to the fact that the Balathal grains were charred as grains, whereas the Terr grains were charred as spikelets and many retain husk fragments), but these later Indian archaeological domesticated rices are clearly shifted away from the range of reference nivara and from Lahuradewa. Thus, using later archaeological rices as a baseline the larger Lahuradewa grains do not look domesticated. There is nothing beyond reasonable doubt to accuse these grains of being domesticated.

Interestingly, if these grains are compared to those from the later Neolithic in the Ganges, e.g. measured grains from Mahagara and Koldihwa, they fit nicely together. Based on recent spikelet base finds from Mahagara (1800-1600 BC), we know this rice to be domesticated. This then implies that there has been no appreciable change in grain size in rice the middle Ganges between ca. 6000 BC and ca. 1800 BC, despste being domesticated by the end of this period. This implies a very different domestication process than that in Chinese rice, in which grains get progressively larger over time as spikelet bases become non-shattering, or from wheat and barley in the Near East (see my Annals of Botany 2007 paper). Indeed, it suggests that there was hardly any selection for increasing grain size in the proto-indica cultivated in the Ganges plains (whenever cultivation began, which remains unclear). This makes sense in terms of hypothesized patterns of wild rice exploitation and minimalist wild plant food production (pre-domestication) cultivation that can be postulated for the Ganges (Fuller & Qin 2009).

This evidence is probably to be expected, given that genetic evidence indicates that several key mutations had to be introduced to proto-indica via hybridization from domesticated japonica, including sh4, for non-shattering, prog1 for erect growth habit, as well as rc for white pericarp. The real leap forward for indica rice was perhaps closer to 2000-1800 BC. Nevertheless the roots of rice cultivation were laid down earlier, but it remains unclear if this was as early of the eariest dates at Lahuradewa or whether these were periodic seasonal rice gatherers.

Diatoms. It is also suggested that the diatom assemblage from the lake sediments indicates rice growing fields. Are they suggesting, implausibly, paddy fields at this date? There is simply too little background work on the ecology of diatoms in natural wetlands where Oryza nivara, O. officinalis, etc, grow to be able to justify this statement. The diatom species that now inhabit rice fields existed before there were rice fields, and they had to come from somewhere. The habitat of wild rices seems the obvious place.

(Appendix) Some general notes on the plant assemblage. Plant taxa reported from Period 1A are: rice (reported as wild and domesticated, but see below), wild Setaria (referred to yellow foxtail millet, S. pumila), Chenopodium (referred to C. album), Coix lachryma-jobi, Artemisia sp., Silene conoidea. The Silene appear to have intact light-coloured hila (Fig. 6.8), which makes one a little concerned that they may be uncharred and intrusive, but maybe not. The rice grains as illustrated are for the most part plump and appear mature, but they are relatively short (more a feature of O. nivara than typical modrn indica), except for a few elongate, thinner grains (Fig. 6.5), at least one of which is poorly formed, which are referred to O. rufipogon; indeed they are quite plausibly rufipogon, but may also include immature grains.

Period 1B (probably 2500-2000 BC, although one wood charcoal date goes back to ca. 2800/2900 BC): apart from rice, finds include free-threshing wheat, barley, lentil, Cyperus, Coix lachryma-jobi, Artemisia, Setaria cf. pumila [Saraswat persists in the use of S. glauca, a taxonomically illegitimate name—Linnaeus’ type specimen was pearl millet not yellow foxtail!-- but lets not squabble], kodo millet (Paspalum scrobiculatum)—these are in the husk and look more likely to be wild/weedy specimens rather then the crop. The rice includes many grains referred to Oryza sativa (reasonable), some O. rufipogon (which again look like they may include immature grains: Fig. 8.8), and some O. officinalis (very short and wide), with length of ~3mm or less (Fig. 8.9). It’s a pity that these and the sativa type grains were not measured for comparison to the Period 1A material. Impressively there is some husk material of O. officinalis. This adds another site to evidence for the exploitation (or at least harvesting) of more than one rice species in the Ganges plain. Emma Harvey (in her PhD, UCL, 2006), at Mahagara and Koldihwa, Neolithic sites of the Second Millennium BC, measured husk phytoliths (the double-peaked morphotypes) and found a small proportion of husk phytoliths that fell well outside of the range of the sativa-rufipogon complex, some of which overlapped reference measurements for O. officinalis. This suggests that we should expect multiple rice species to occur on many early sites in this region.

Millet watch: Setaria genetics

2009-06-25T09:10:00.001+01:00

Plant Physiology for January includes a short, useful review on the genetics of foxtail millet, by Doust, Kellogg, Devos and Bennetzen. From this we learn that work is underway to prepare a full genome sequence for Setaria. It usefully provides an bibliography on the phylogenetc and genetic diversity studies in Setaria italica and viridis. Most of these have concluded that Setaria italica is polyphyletic (work by Kawase, Fukunaga, etc.), although the number fo domestications versus the role of introgression with local wild populations deserves further research. It includes some discussion of architectural changes, relating to growth habit--especially apical dominance-- that were important in the domestication process of this species (and also most other cereals).

More genetic reviews on domestication

2009-06-25T06:30:00.004+01:00

Domestication seems as hot a topic as ever, everyone is writing review papers on domestication, especially from a genetics perpsective. Often with varying degrees of ignoring, or sometimes misconveying the archaeological contribution. The paper by Brown et al in TREE late last year is a nice example of the integration of genetics and archaeology, with a focus on the Near East; there was also my own attempt (Purugganan & Fuller, in honour of Darwin). But here I would like to flag some others.

Writing recently in Plant Physiology, Sang Tao (who has done important work on finding and sequencing the sh4 domestication genes [Science 2006] which contributes to non shattering in domesticated rices-- and is shared across indica and japonica), reviews genes and mutations underlying domestication in grasses. It summarizes some of the recent functional genes reported and sequenced from rice, barley and wheat, with focus on thise genes involved in tough-rachis/ non-shattering. References to the archaeological record are absent. The general conclusion is that most domestication genes are a single mutation for a single trait, despite the fact that they are shared across diverse cultivated lines that may have different phylogenetic origins. He therefore conludes that hybridization and gene flow moved adaptive domestication genes across early cultivated populations. Indeed, this was probably a key factor in rice domestication. But contrary to Sang's assumption that non-shattering (sh4) arose in indica, I have argued (in a recent WA) it is likely to have arisen in japonica and spread to South Asia with japonica rice and other Chinese crops (and harvest knives) in the Late Harappan era (ca. 1900 BC), which represents something of a 'Chinese horizon' in northwestern South Asia.

There is a fundamental implication of a key role of hybridization in the formation of the crops we know today. Wheat researchers have long knwon this, due to polyploidy. Hexaploid bread did arise by hybridization, between a domesticated tetraploid and a wild relative. But genetics is increaaing suggesting this sort of thing was not the exception but the norm. Barley has tow distinct origins (West and East of the fertile crescent), but naked barleys of both origin share the mutation nud. The evidence indica rice clearly implicates hybridization in the making of fully domesticated indica: domestication genes that were selected by Neolithic Chinese farmers foufound their way through pollen into primitive prototype indica cultivars, which already had important adaptations to the monsoonal environment of South Asia.

This seems to raise a further question which is to what extent gene flow and hyrbdization was crucial in the earliest stages of pre-domestication cultivation? The move to accepting a protracted transition to domestication, would seem to open up this possiblility. Thus selection for large grains in one area, non-shattering in another, and erect growth in yet another seems plausible, and the extended period of pre-domestication cultivation may be necessary for this various adaptation to be brought together. Culturally this implies contact, the exchange and sharing seed stocks between communities, and in the case of rice apparently over long distances. For archaeologists who have studies things like the trade in obsidian, or the translocation of crops between African and India, in prehistory, this should come as no surprise. People were connected (even if irregularly and indirectly) over quite long distances sometimes. The evolution of cultivation systems and the crops in them was taking place in the context of interconnected communities and cultures.

Sang also raises but does not attempt the solve the historical problem that temperate japonica rices have another additional non-shattering gene (qsh1), which seems to me to be most likely selected for later as japonica cultivars were subjected to new forms of harvesting (such as basal harvesting by true sickles, which occur in China from the late 4th/ early third M. BC?) and processing.

Recent commentaries: the surge of archaeobotany

2009-06-25T02:20:00.000+01:00

These have been a busy few months for the archaeobotany of domestication, or at least those keeping up with reading new publications. (The hard work producing the data was no doubt also busily spread out over the past few years). Since December we have seen new data on early foods in Peru, Maize in Mexico, North American crops, new thoughts on the wild food use at the start of Near Eastern domestication (Willcox et al., in The Holocene [or GCW's site]), new early evidence for Panicum miliaceum cultivation in Gansu, and then even earlier dates in central China at Cishan, and the evidence on the evoution of domesticated rice from Tianluoshan. Well-preserved granaries (the oldest) from the PPNA of Jordan when cereals were still morphologically wild but probably cultivated, have also been noted (blog here). The vast majority of these studies appeared in big impact journals (PNAS, Science), and these have of course, attracted some wisened commentaries. Here are some links to those commentaries but (without any particular further comments on them).

T. Douglas Price, commenting on Smith & Yarnell, in PNAS 106 (16): 6427-6428

Gary Crawford, commenting on Lu et al , in PNAS 106 (18): 7271-7272

Martin Jones & X. Liu in Science (8 May 2009), commenting on Tianluoshan, and early Chinese millets.

Large granaries and pre-domestication cultivation

2009-06-24T05:46:00.000+01:00

Pre-domestication granaries in Jordan: Kuijt & Finlayson (2009) in PNAS report preserved archaeological structures for granaries—round buildings which would have had raised wooden floors and lifespans of ca. 50 years. (This has also been reported by Michael Balter on the ScienceNOW blog.) They suggest these structures might have contained morphologically wild barley. It is a pity the archaeobotanical evidence from this site, which they elude to, is not actually presented in any detail (nor is whoever has done the work mentioned in the acknowledgements).

The quality of the excavation and the reconstruction of the architectural remains is exemplary, and leaves little doubt that raised floor granaries were constructed at Dhra (and presumable other Southern Levant sites) in the PPNA, by ca. 9200 BC. This is important evidence, since storage has more often been inferred than structurally demonstrated. They associate these structures with evidence from other sites for morphologically wild cereals (Gilgal: oats and barley; Netiv Hagdud: barley) and suggest that large-scale storage was a key part of the transition to reliance on pre-domestication cultivation. This evidence for large scale storage starting only in the PPNA seems to challenge our expectations that storage amongst hunter-gatherers ought to be a prerequisite for cultivation. Instead it appears that large-scale storage occurs alongside, or even results from (occurring after), the move to early cultivation. Undoubtedly there would have been smaller-scale precursors, such as the more limited evidence of possible Natufian silos and caching that they review.

Also of interest is the observation that storage structures move from public spaces to the inside of houses at ca. 8500 BC in the PPNB and then to special rooms by 7500 BC. This shift seems to parallel the move from early pre-domestication cultivation to more intensive cultivation as domestication traits, like non-shattering that began to increase in cereal populations from c.8500 BC and became predominant after 7500 BC (as documented for the northern Levant by Tanno & Willcox, Science 2006; and for the broader region, including Jordan, in Fuller 2007 Ann. Bot.—most of the evidence from Jordan is from S. Colledge (2001) Plant exploitation on epipalaeolithic and early neolithic sites in the Levant, BAR). This also parallels a trend in the find spots of food processing tools (grinding stones), documented by Karen Wright (UCL), which move from public spaces in the Natufian to inside houses in the PPNA-Ea. PPNB and into well-hidden back rooms by the end of the PPNB (Wright, K, 2000. The social origins of cooking and dining in early villages of western Asia, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 66, 89-12)

There is something of a southern Levant bias reflected in this paper, as archaeobotanical evidence for cultivation, and even archaeological evidence for possible storage structures from the Northern Levant (Syria) seems to be ignored. As reflected especially by the work of Willcox (e.g. Science 2006; the Balter News Focus piece of 2007), as well as work by Hillman and Colledge, pre-domestication cultivation is demonstrated earlier by ca. 10,000 BC at Mureybit and Qaramel. Perhaps upto 500-1000 years earlier at Abu Hureryra. Many northern sites (Mureybit, Tell Abr, Jerf el Ahmar) have large sunken floor ‘public buildings’. While these are usually regarded as structures of ritual use, they may also have been used for storing grain as suggested recently by Willcox et al. (2008) based on grain finds at Tell Abr., Vegetation History & Archaeobotany 17, p. 315). Oddly, this paper’s weakness is that it has a rather limited view of the archaeobotanical evidence, ignoring the broader macro-regional pattern for the shift to cultivation that accompanies increasing sedentism and architectural investment (both in the northern Levant/upper Euphrates area—probably first, and then the Jordan valley, a little later). It ignores archaeobotanical data from elsewhere in Jordan (e.g. publications by S. Colledge, J. Meadows). The examples it draws on are some of the least well-documented cases for pre-domestication cultivation, as they lack arable weed flora or sequences of change towards morphological domestication (by contrast to northern Levant cases), and despite some headline pieces in Science have never been published in any detail. (I nevertheless agree that they almost certainly are pre-domestication cultivation). In the end this is a nice archaeological find, with some great illustrations, but if feels somehow that they rushed to press without too much account for the archaeobotany.

Expanding African phytolith potential

2009-06-21T09:20:00.000+01:00

An article in the latest Annals of Botany, by John Mercader et al., presents results from a study of phytoliths from modern vegetation in the forests near Lake Nisiala in Mozambique. This is an important baseline and background study, which should contribute to the potential application of phytolith analysis in archaeology and palaeoenvironmental studies in East Africa. Perhaps most importantly they have considered issues of expected relative preservation rates for different morpotypes and the patterning of phytolith assemablges representing different families, even in the absence of true species diagnostics, which should allow for inferring the vegetation type of the Miombo woodlands. Combined with a few other, widely dispersed phytoltih moprhotype studies in parts of Africa, listed below, this represents another important step on the path of developing systematic archaeobotany in sub-Saharan Africa. Other previous background studies, include:

Bremond L, Alexandre A, Peyron O, Guiot J. 2005. Grass water stress estimated from phytoliths in West Africa. Journal of Biogeography 32: 311–327.
Bremond L, Alexandre A, Wooller MJ, et al. 2008. Phytolith indices as proxies of grass subfamilies on East African tropical mountains. Global and Planetary Change 61: 209–224.
Runge F. 1999. The opal phytolith inventory of soils in Central Africa – quantities, shapes, classification, and spectra. Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology 107: 23–53.
Runge F, Runge J. 1997. Opal phytoliths in East African plants and soils. In: Pinilla A, Juan-Tresseras J, Machado MJ eds. The state-of-the-art of phytoliths in soils Madrid: Centro de Ciencias Medioambientales. 71–81.

Post-Doc position for the archaeobotany of rice

2009-06-19T13:55:00.000+01:00

This is just to mirror the newlu advertised post-doc position at UCL, for candidates who are (or will be) qualified at doctoral level with expertise in the relevant research areas, to join our project 'The Identification of Arable Rice Systems in Prehistory'. The project is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the appointment is for the period 1 September 2009 to 31 August 2012. In particular, we are seeking an established track record in phytolith analysis. In addition expertise in archaeobotany, palaeoenvironments or archaeology in Asia would be helpful.

The candidate with join a diverse archaeobotanical research laboratory, but will be expected to focus on phytolith analyses from Chinese archaeological and modern analogue samples. The candidate may also be involved in assisting/advising student research on Indian samples. This project will involve fieldwork in China, Cambodia, Thailand and possibly additional countries.

For further information on the overall research project, visit this web-page: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/silva/archaeology/staff/profiles/fuller/rice and for further details, contact the project leader, Dr. Dorian Q Fuller (this blogger). It would also be helpful to know your intention to apply, via email, before the closing date.

The starting salary is on Grade 7 point 29, currently £28,839 per annum plus £2,781 London Allowance per annum.

Interviews are expected to be held between 15th and 22nd July 2009.

A downloadable application form is available from the UCL Job Opportunities website or by contact Louisa Goldsmith at l.goldsmith@ucl.ac.uk, 0207 679 7503.

Please complete an applications form and send with a covering letter, full CV and two letters of reference to Louisa Goldsmith UCL Institute of Archaeology, 31-34 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PY or by email to l.goldsmith@ucl.ac.uk.

UCL Taking Action For Equality.

The closing date for applications is Monday, 6th July 2009.