Fallow Management and the Origins of Swidden Agriculture in the Tropics

Author(s): Huw Barton

Year: 2015

Summary

This paper considers the idea that the origin of swidden agriculture in the tropics arose from long-term practices of fallow management. In various forms, these ideas have been expressed before (particularly in South America), though swidden systems are normally thought of as being introduced into mainland and island Southeast Asia along with rice and taro ‘agriculture’ from southern China. This paper suggests instead that certain ‘domesticates’ may have been integrated into a pre-existing fallow management system, one that may also have contained ‘domesticates’. At different times, scholars of tropical agriculture have placed different emphases on the ‘fallow’ as either a ‘pause’ between sowing crops or as a functional and productive aspect of the agricultural system itself. This paper looks at evidence of the latter in the tropics of Southeast Asia and South America. When the ‘fallow’ is thought of as the engine behind a system of human induced disturbance designed to drive biodiversity that is good for humans, patch mosaic management, in places like Australia, can also be seen as part of this same or at least similar, behavioural approach to niche construction.

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Cite this Record

Fallow Management and the Origins of Swidden Agriculture in the Tropics. Huw Barton. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 395655)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

min long: 66.885; min lat: -8.928 ; max long: 147.568; max lat: 54.059 ;