Crop translocation modes and motivations

A few months ago, some of the SEALINK project members, put out a paper in World Archaeology, "Old World Globalization and the Colombian Exchange: comparions and contrast." While this paper is ostensibly a critique of the paper a year early by our colleagues in Cambridge (Jones & al Food Globalization in Prehistory), that is really only a starting point for a conversation of how and why crop spread at apparently quite early dates. While Jones et al propose that one mechanism was a desire for calories, i.e. a need to produce more staple foods, with a preference for easy to grow crops, we have taken issue with this suggesting instead that in many cases, perhaps in most cases, initial translocation of crops was small scale, experimental, and unlikely to have been of much subsistence importance. There are a few evidential problems we have catalogued, like dubiously early (Neolithic) dates for millet or buckwheat in Europe that  really are not supported by recent systematic archaeobotanical work in Europe. This paper also includes an updating mapping of the eastward spread of wheat and its associates (barley, but also lentil, pea, etc.) into China and India. This aspect of the paper I have noted on the archaeobotanist blog, in relation to the eastern extensive of crop spread from the Near East. However, it is the contrasts between India and China, which I think are most interesting. The Near Eastern crops as a group were much more important in India, although gradually and with distance this became less the case, while in the China it is only wheat at arrives early and it really appear unimportant. Indeed historical sources point to its importance arising in much later periods. While both region get wheat at around the same time (later 3rd millennium BC), the patterns of uptake are very different, implying differing social motivations. This leads to what I consider the most important part of the paper, the start of a discussion of how we should classify crops, in terms of value, both social and economic, and how crops change in value with time and context. Thus one culture staple crop is another culture exotica or cash crop, and where a crop fall in this schema, whether available in bulk or rare, locally or imported, changes over time. We would like to see this as the start of a new way thinking about how foodstuffs and crops fit into the borader patterns of social interaction both locally and long-distance.

Antiquity's Ben Cullen Prize Winners, 2011

Congratulations to Dorian Fuller, Nicky Boivin, Tom Hoogervorst and Robin Allaby who have won this year's Ben Cullen Prize, awarded to the runner up for best contribution to the journal, Antiquity.

Every year Antiquity awards prizes for the best article they have published.  The Ben Cullen prize was set up in memory a bright young scholar at Cambridge, who died all too young.  Here is the title and abstract.  Click below to see the article. 

Across the Indian Ocean: the prehistoric movement of plants and animals

Dorian Q Fuller, Nicole Boivin, Tom Hoogervorst, Robin Allaby

Schematic map of major Bronze Age translocations 

Here is a major research project that is peopling the Indian Ocean with prehistoric seafarers exchanging native crops and stock between Africa and India. Not the least exciting part of the work is the authors’ contention that the prime movers of this maritime adventure were not the great empires but a multitude of small-scale entrepreneurs.

For the article, click here

Sourcing the 'lost Saraswati' river: new geological evidence

[from thearchaeobotanist]

Recently published on-line in Geology  is a paper which might not appear on the surface to be very archaeobotanical, but which is important for thinking about the past agriculture of the Indus valley. This is by Clift et al (2012) on "U-Pb zircon dating evidnece for a Pleistocene Sarasvati River and capture of the Yamuna River". This paper provides sources for the headwater sediments in the various rivers of the Indus system based on zircon finger-printed (geological source dating in the 1000s of millions of years). These dated source profiles in turn are stratified in the Pleistocene and Holocene river sequences which have been dated by OSL. These river systems include the now extinct Ghaggar-Hakra river, often equated with the 'lost Saraswati" of Indian epic. The paper shows that while the Ghaggar-Hakra used to be much larger in the Pleistocene, drawing on the headwaters that now feed the  Yamuna, tha Yamuna had begun to flow  east into the Ganges before the End of the Pleistocene, and therefore well before the start of Harappan urban societies. Throughout the Holocene, including the Harappan period this river was fed only by seasonal monsoon rain in the east. This rain-fed Ghaggar-Hakra was  active until after 4.5 ka and was then covered by dunes before 1.4 ka. What this means is that the Ghaggar-Hakra, unlike any of the major Indus tributaries, was not fed by snow melt, which begins in Spring and may be unpredictable, but was entirely reliant on swelling its banks from the summer monsoon. This means it would have been an ideal river for winter crop agriculture, along the lines of the Nile flood regime which is keyed to the Blue Nile's monsoon source, with sowing of wheat and barley in Oct.-Nov. as the monsoon flood began to recede to leave behind a rich floodplain. These could then be left to mature until harvests in March or April, without fear of early snowmelt floods ruining crops. It really should come as no surprise then that so many Harappan Bronze Age sites concentrated in this valley. Nevertheless as monsoons gradually weakened (already underway during the Harappan period) with the flood water source retreating eastwards, and the Thar desert expanding, the valley became gradually drier and eventually choked with desert sands. This, however happened in Iron Age or post-Iorn Age times, so thus there is no basis for correlating any catastrophic shift in the Ghaggar-Hakra with the end of the Harappan civilization-- a notion which has often appealed to archaeologists.

[edited for typos 9.2.2102 DF]