Earlier sorghum in Sudan

I have recently been made aware of a small report in Nyame Akuma on Kasala (northeast Sudan), where Italian researchers have restarted research which can be regarded as following on from the 1980s survey headed by R. Fattovich. The new work has included the study of some plant impressions in ceramics published as "Sorghum exploitation at Kasala and its environs, North Eastern Sudan in the Second and First Millennium BC" by Alemseged Beldados and Lorenzo Constantini in Nyame Akuma vol. 75. As its title indicates this study does confirm the present of Sorghum bicolor, plausibly (but not definitively) domesticated, in ceramics from the site of Mahal Teglinos and some from near by survey collections. It reports examination of 25 sherds of which 11 from Teglinos and 11 from survey have sorghum.

As many will know I have been critical of some previous sorghum identification from impressions, in particular coming out the lab in Rome (most infamously those from Oman and Yemen). As a result, in various tallies of early sorghum I have always regarded the 1980s report of Sorghum of the Kasala region survey as requiring a big question mark next to it (e.g. "The economic basis of the Qustul splinter state"). The sorghum here, at least in fig 4, looks legitimate. The suggestion that grains shape (narrow versus wide) can be used to identify both wild and domesticated sorghum is more problematic. Meroitic Umm Nuri produced very very thin but apparently domesticated sorghum (published by me in Sudan and Nubia 2004).What is really needed is clean views of spikelet bases (for wild versus domesticated hulled forms) or evidence for still attached rachillae (especially in free-threshing forms).

I now believe that sorghum is there in Kasala, dated by ceramics (Mokram group) and association to 1500-500 BC. This is important news, as it takes sorghum earlier probably than any of the find in the Nile Valley, which are mainly Meroitic, and with possibly earlier Napatan sorghum at Kawa (in Sudan and Nubian 2004). This is a relief given that it is India before this time by at least a couple of centuries, and maybe more (for an updated review of early African crops in South Asia see by papers in Nicole Boivin, either that in J. World Prehistory on Arabia, or the Etudes Ocean Indien paper [in English]).

Some of the other identifications, notably cowpea (Vigna unguiculata) reported from one impression remain unconvincing, at least as photographed, and I really cannot except them on this sort of evidence. I would also expect pulse seeds to make poor temper for pottery. While we might expect this species in this region and period, as it was in cultivation prior to 1500 BC in West Africa and had arrived in India too by this time, I'll await more convincing evidence.

It is a pity high quality imaging, especially SEMs, were not made of the casts as, then one could see finer details of morphology like characteristic hairs, etc., that really clinch an ID. (See, for example the unicellular  e.g. w&v in the images from the Essouk archaeobotanical report, also a rachis stalk which suggests it is domesticated).

Also tantalizing is the evidence for millet, Setaria, impressions in 3 sherds. As illustrated, one could also propose a Bracharia and we really need better resolution SEMs and husk comparisons to get this to species level. Nevertheless it is plausibly a fit for S. sphaceleata, which is of particular interest as the  "lost" millet of Nubia,which we have evidence for cultivation of from Napatan to Medieval times (Kawa, Qasr Ibrim, Nauri). The origins and history of this lost millet of Nubia really needs to be chased down. It has gone extinct from Nubia in the past millennium, replaced by Setaria italica.

(Thanks to Mike Brass for bringing this paper to my attention)

Debating early African bananas

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

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.

African Archaeobotany 2011

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.

A dialog on rice in Indian cultural history

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 mozhigaḷukkellaam 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!)

New Indian Ocean Corridors Blog

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....