OFFPRINT A history of fruits on the Southeast Asian mainland Roger Blench Kay Williamson Educational Foundation Cambridge, UK E-mail:
[email protected] http://www.rogerblench.info/RBOP.htm Occasional Paper 4 Linguistics, Archaeology and the Human Past Edited by Toshiki OSADA and Akinori UESUGI Indus Project Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Kyoto, Japan 2008 ISBN 978-4-902325-33-1 A history of Fruits on the Southeast Asian mainland A history of fruits on the Southeast Asian mainland Roger Blench Kay Williamson Educational Foundation Cambridge, UK E-mail:
[email protected] http://www.rogerblench.info/RBOP.htm ABSTRACT The paper presents an overview of the history of the principal tree fruits grown on the Southeast Asian mainland, making use of data from biogeography, archaeobotany, iconography and linguistics. Many assertions in the literature about the origins of particular species are found to be without empirical basis. In the absence of other data, comparative linguistics is an important source for tracing the spread of some fruits. Contrary to the Pacific, it seems that many of the fruits we now consider characteristic of the region may well have spread in recent times. INTRODUCTION empirical base for Pacific languages is not matched for mainland phyla such as Austroasiatic, Daic, Sino- This study 1) is intended to complement a previous Tibetan or Hmong-Mien, so accounts based purely paper on the history of tree-fruits in island Southeast on Austronesian tend to give a one-sided picture. Asia and the Pacific (Blench 2005). Arboriculture Although occasional detailed accounts of individual is very neglected in comparison to other types of languages exist (e.g.