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)

Obscure crops of 2011 and an obscure book

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 is not entirely new; diversity of cultivars has been being gained and lost since agriculture began.

De-centering the fertile crescent

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!

Recent commentaries: the surge of archaeobotany

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.

The Forgotten Oil Millet of Taiwan

Question: so what is the world's most obscure crop? Browntop millet (Brachiaria ramosa), now very relict, but clearly important as a millet in Neolithic South India is normally one of my favorite candidates, or perhaps one of the minor Digitaria domesticates of West Africa or Assam. The poetically named sumpweed, Iva annua, now extinct from cultivation is another good candidate, although it is now well-known to archaeologists through the work of Bruce Smith and others (see, e.g. his recent article discussed below). I now think that this dubious distinction goes to a crop from Taiwan.So I should put on record my fascination with an obscure, and largely forgotten, millet, and an obscure article. This article is mainly in Japanese (but with an English abstract).

• Takei, Emiko (2008) Historical review of Spodiopogon formosanus Rendle, a minor grain crop in Taiwan. Bulletin of the Cultural and Natural Sciences in Osaka Gakuin University 57: 43-66.....Unfortunately neither this publication nor its abstract seems to be available freely on-line, although a bibliographic record is here. I reproduce the English abstract here.

Abstract: This paper re-examines botanical descriptions of Spodiopogon formosanus Rendle (syn. Eccoilopus formosanus (Rendl.) A. Camus), a cultivated millet endemic to Taiwan. In the early 20^th Century, this species was described as a new species, and its cultivation by Taiwan aboriginal people was noted. No detailed account of its cultivation was published, and the plant became an invisible crop in botanical and ethnographic literature.During the Japanese occupation period (1895-1945), classification of this and related grasses became confused and unclear. The genus was changed, and new species and varieties added. The fact of cultivation was given little attention, and the cultivation itself became less common over time. The existence of this crop is still not well known and documented. The most recent edition of the Flora of Taiwan does not indicate that the plant is cultivated, and gives no information about its distribution. The confusion in taxonomy and general lack of information have also caused difficulty in other fields. Non-botanists have documented this species under a different plant name, not only because they were not familiar with the plant, but also because no reliable botanical information was available.Spodoipogon formosanus has not been mentioned in ethnological or agricultural papers over the last 100 years, but there may be reports under different plant names. Further exploration is needed to locate reports concerning the cultivation of minor grain crops in Taiwan, and some may need re-interpretation.

Spodiopogon formosanus is described in Kew Garden's world grass flora, but here no mention is made of cultivation. In the new Flora of China, on which Missouri Botanical Garden is collaborating, it is noted that this species "has been cultivated in the uplands of Taiwan," and we can note that the species is reported to be endemic to Taiwan between 1000 and 2000 meters. It also is decribed as being 'not bearded' (i.e. awnless) with spikelets that do not disarticulate. In otherwords it has two clear traits of morphological domestication that are part of the syndrome relating to loss of natural seed dispersal.

This species was first described by Rendle (1904) in his contribution on the grasses of Taiwain within the larger study of Chinese plants by Forbes and Hemsley published in Journal of the Linnean Society 36.(p.351). Rendle classified this by comparison to Spodiopogon sibiricus, indicating that the comparison suggests “a cultivated form of that species”. Notable contrasts in S. formosanum includes the absence of sessile spikelet (typical of Spodiopogon), less hairy spikelets, “the almost complete disappearance of the awn on the fertile glume”. Most of these traits are plausible adaptations of the domestication syndrome: a reduction in dispersal aids (hairs and awns) and the development of non-shattering pedicel in place of a dehiscence scar, which is paralleled in the evolution of non-shattering in domesticated pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum).

So this is a domesticated species, but what is its wild progenitor, and was it brought into cultivation only in Taiwan, or was there a former distribution or even origin on the mainland? The wild species S. cotulifer, also in Taiwan and on the mainland, is perhaps the best candidate according to Takei. Further botanical and ethnobotanical studies, which Dr. Takei is actively pursuing are important, but there is a role to be played (eventually) by archaeobotanists, in documenting the present and past use of this species in the past. It is possible that this a relatively recent secondary domesticate. To that end we of course need to know what it looks like. Here is an SEM of a grain taken at RIHN in Kyoto (where I have been visiting) from material collected by Takei.

In very general terms it resembles some of small-medium sized Panicum spp. (like Indian P. sumatrense and perhaps Panicum miliaceum var ruderale), but it is reassuringly different from Setaria italica or Panicum miliaceum var milicaeum, that when found in quantity it should stick out. Its cultivation is distinctive too, as it is a perennial with abundant secondary tillering—very clear on plants that Dr. Takei is growing in her garden in Kyoto.

So what do we call this millet? For the specialist, Spodiopogon formosanum, is obviously to be preferred, but a catchy handle might help to draw attention to our glaring knowledge gap on this species. (Pre)histories of Taiwan are usualy written with an emphasis on rice, Setaria italica, and sometimes sugarcane, as species that reconstruct to Proto-Austronesian, and have at least some archaeological presence. But archaeologists, linguists, botanists need to not ignore this species but seek its history; so perhaps some agreed upon common name might help. As far as I can discover this crop lacks a common name in English, which doubtless helps to keep it out of mind and largely forgotten. The USDA Agricultural Research service lists 'silver greybeard' or 'silver spike' as names for Spodiopogon sibiricus, a wild relative of northeast Asia. But given the awnless state of S. formosanus, and the fact that it sometimes has reddish leaves, does not recommend adapting one of those. The Chinese name applied to this genus of grasses, you mang, means 'oily Mang-grass' (with mang being the general Chinese name of the Miscanthus complex), and it is worth noting that the grains of Spodiopogon appear unusually oily for a grass or cereal, so I have tentatively suggested that we might refer to this species as the moutain oil millet, or perhaps Formosan Oil Millet?

New World Archaeobotany Watch: early dates for maize and other centres

Rio Balsas Maize, 6700 BC. New data pushes back maize earlier in Mexico than outside mexico and in the right part of Mexico, but notice that it is already domesticated, which means the beginnings of cultivation are earlier. This has a ScienceNOW post by Michael Balter, and the artilce by Piperno et al in PNAS (March 2009), "Starch grain and phytolith evidence for early ninth millennium B.P. maize from the Central Balsas River Valley, Mexico," needs to be read with the Ranere et al PNAS paper in the volume on the archaeological context., "The cultural and chronological context of early Holocene maize and squash domestication in the Central Balsas River Valley, Mexico".

North Peruvian Early Agriculture. Starch grain data from human teeth confirms the consumption og Phaseolus beans, squach (Cucurbita cf. moschata) and peanut at ca. 6000 BC, as reported in the recent (Dec 2008) PNAS paper by Piperno and Dillehay. The confirms the evidence of macrobotanical remains reported by Dillehay et al in 2007 in Science, in which AMS dates pushed cultivation in this region back to 7000-8000 BC. While all this may be suggestive of this area being an early focus of agriculture (and it featured as possible centre 3c in the recent Purugganan and Fuller map in a Nature review), some of this crops (certainly peanut) and arguably squash (?) were probably not native this particular region, implying that their start to cultivation was somewhere else and even earlier!

North American Early Crops. The latest installment on the evidence for indigenous domesticates of the later Mid-Holocene of Eastern North America is represented by the Smith and Yarnell report on the Riverton seed assemblage in PNAS 7 April 2009, which includes some of the classic 'lost crops' of North America such as Hordeum pusillium and Chenopodium berlanderi