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Pathways to Asian Civilizations: Tracing the Origins and Spread of Rice and Rice Cultures

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Pathways to Asian Civilizations: Tracing the Origins and Spread of Rice and Rice Cultures Rice (2011) 4:78–92 DOI 10.1007/s12284-011-9078-7 Pathways to Asian Civilizations: Tracing the Origins and Spread of Rice and Rice Cultures Dorian Q. Fuller Received: 29 October 2011 /Accepted: 8 December 2011 /Published online: 4 January 2012 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 Abstract Modern genetics, ecology and archaeology are hierarchical, complex societies of states (e.g. Trigger 2003), combined to reconstruct the domestication and diversification and rice has been part of agricultural production of most of of rice. Early rice cultivation followed two pathways towards these from the Ganges to the Mekong to China’s central plains domestication in India and China, with selection for domesti- (although one can argue that millets were more central to the cation traits in early Yangtze japonica and a non-domestication earliest Chinese (Xia-Shang-Zhou) state(s)). Other anthropol- feedback system inferred for ‘proto-indica’. The protracted ogists, such as those from the French Maussian tradition, use domestication process finished around 6,500–6,000 years ago civilization in the sense of a larger regional shared core of in China and about two millennia later in India, when hybrid- cultural ideas, within which many states and smaller societies ization with Chinese rice took place. Subsequently farming may be grouped (e.g. Durkheim and Mauss 1913;Swedberg populations grew and expanded by migration and incorpora- 2010; also, Rowlands 2003). As succinctly summarized by tion of pre-existing populations. These expansions can be Wengrow (2010: xviii) civilization “should refer to historical linked to hypothetical language family dispersal models, in- outcomes of exchanges and borrowings between societies cluding dispersal from China southwards by the Sino-Tibetan rather than to processes or attributes that set one society apart and Austronesian groups. In South Asia much dispersal of rice from another.” I would suggest the study of civilization must took place after Indo-Aryan and Dravidian speakers adopted pay attention to both the borrowings that link large geograph- rice from speakers of lost languages of northern India. ical and population areas and ways in which those borrowings are reshaped to be adapted to local cultural styles and differ- Keywords Domestication . Origins of Agriculture . ences within the area. A later historical example is provided Archaeology. Historical Linguistics . Genetics . by Buddhism which spread widely through monsoon Asia but Archaeobotany took on very different regional expressions in China, Japan, Thailand or Sri Lanka. The sharing of rice agriculture is an earlier example, which shows as much regional variation in Introduction cultivation styles and preferences as it shows similarities. Rice is clearly central to wider East Asian, Southeast Asian Rice as food and crop is central to the identities of many Asian and South Asian civilization areas in terms of economy and societies, indeed most mainstream state cultures in East, landscape (Gorou 1984;Bray1994). Indeed some scholars Southeast and South Asia, from the Japanese to Sichuanese, have pointed to a great and fundamental contrast between to the Thai or Sri Lankan Sinhala see rice as a core part of their the civilization(s) of rice and Mediterranean bread cultures cultural tradition. Rice is central to the civilizations of mon- (e.g. Watsuji 1961; Hardricourt 1962;Hosoyaetal.2010). soon Asia in two senses. For many Anglo-American archae- Fuller and Rowlands (2009, 2011) highlight the linked ologists and anthropologists, “civilization” refers to tradition of cooking (boiling and steaming), food textural preference (sticky, as with glutinous rice), and feasting and D. Q. Fuller (*) ritual focused on keeping ancestors close. Whichever def- Institute of Archaeology, University College London, inition of civilization is preferred, it is clear that the history 31-34 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PY, UK of Asian societies, their human populations and the evolu- e-mail: [email protected] tionary history of rice as a crop are inseparable. The Rice (2011) 4:78–92 79 importance of rice agriculture as a motor for demographic suitable tropical and subtropical climate with suitable wet- growth, population expansion and origins of sedentary vil- land areas will have shifted dramatically over the past lage life has been stressed by many archaeologists and 20,000 years. Such environments would have necessarily forms a key component in the farming/language dispersal peaked in the earlier Holocene when summer insolation in hypothesis (e.g. Higham 2003;Bellwood1996, 1997, the northern hemisphere was significantly higher (it fell 2011;Blust1996; Sagart 2003) This paper assesses our gradually from about 7000 BP to present, Berger 1978) current state of knowledge about the beginnings of rice and during the first half of the Holocene (until about 5,000 cultivation and the spread of rice inferred from archaeobo- or 6,000 years ago) monsoon rainfall was much higher (e.g. tanical evidence, its congruence with genetic inferences and Burns 2011; see also, Fuller and Qin 2010). The post- how this might have been linked to major cultural traditions Pleistocene expansion of wild rice, from southern tropical represented by language families. refugia of the glacial period northwards to eastern China and the Yangtze basin (Fig. 1), would have entailed at least one if not several population bottlenecks in O. rufipogon. An- The ecologies of rice’s wild relatives: two pathways other reason modern maps are potentially misleading is that to cultivation the potential habitats for wild rice have been removed through human action over the past few thousand years, Rice can be inferred to have entered cultivation on two especially through the reclamation of wetlands for agricul- pathways from wild ecology and human use. The wild ture. As a result many wild rice populations have presum- progenitors of Asian rice are well-known to include Oryza ably been extirpated. Evidence for this comes from Chinese rufipogon sensu stricto and Oryza nivara, which are native texts from the Song dynasty (just over 1,000 years ago, to South and Southeast Asia, extending northwards into under essentially modern climatic conditions) which indi- Southern China. Modern distribution maps are potentially cate the former presence of wild rice populations in eastern misleading for a couple of important reasons: first and China in the Lower Yangtze and northwards to Shandong foremost, there has been climatic change such that areas of (Ho 1977;You1987). Fig. 1 Map of Last Glacial (20,000 BP) refugial wild rice zones (P) Fuller et al. 2010a). Early foci of archaeological evidence relating to versus Early Holocene (9,000 BP) expansion (H) of wild rice in early cultivation are indicated. comparison to recent populations indicated by crosses and circles (after 80 Rice (2011) 4:78–92 There has long been a case to be made for the separate 2009). The perennial rufipogon would have normally been a origins of domesticated indica and japonica rice subspecies, fairly poor grain resource, with more metabolic energy from various modern genetic markers, from old-fashioned invested in vegetative tissues. This necessitated human manip- crossing to re-sequenced genomes (e.g. Garris et al. 2005; ulation of soil and water environment to induce a drought Londo et al. 2006; Kawakami et al. 2007;Heetal.2011). response of higher grain productivity. Over time there would Recent versions of this scenario highlight the necessity of have been selection for more annuality and reduced vegetative hybridization between a fully domesticated japonica and growth (shorter and straighter growth habit), as well as in- semi-domesticated or wild proto-indica (Figs. 2 and 3), creasing grain yields and grain size. Thus more intensive whereby japonica became the donor of many domestication human efforts at managing the soil and water conditions of syndrome genes in indica (Sang and Ge 2007; Sweeney and early cultivated rufipogon would have been repaid by increas- McCouch 2007;Fulleretal.2010a). It is worth noting that ing yields and the accumulation of domestication genes. The there are still emerging complications in the story of early archaeological evidence from the Lower Yangtze supports this domestication genes, since experiments by Ishikawa et al. inferred process (Fuller and Qin 2009, 2010). By contrast, the (2010) indicate that plants homozygous for the sh4 non- annual O. nivara wild rices could have been exploited on a shattering mutation still show wild-type shattering in the large scale without any serious cultivation, or selection of context of mainly wild-type genetic background, i.e. there habit changes or domestication traits. This represents a are other interacting alleles yet to be identified. Because of “proto-indica” hypothesis (Fuller et al. 2010a) in which inten- incomplete compatibility between japonica and indica rices, sive exploitation of proto-indica wild types, which probably first-generation hybrids would have had low fertility requiring included burning off competing vegetation and some broad- back-crossing to one or the other parent (Sato 1996); in the cast sowing, could have taken place for millennia without the context of India, this is likely to have been the widespread, and evolution of domesticated rice (Fuller 2011). In other words climatically adapted, proto-indica. A model of this process is we would expect the adaptive syndrome of annual wild rice provided by the development of Oryza glaberimma × Oryza
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