Fallow Management and the Origins of Swidden Agriculture in the Tropics

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.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• New Perspectives on Agricultural Origins

Keywords

Spatial Coverage