From wild rice harvesting to domestic rice agriculture in South Asia.

Summary

It is still unclear if India saw an independent domestication of rice, and so the origins of Oryza sativa indica, as distinct from the Chinese rice O. s. japonica, are shrouded in mystery. However, there is very early evidence dating to c.9000 BP of wild rice exploitation, and perhaps of crop management, from Northern India. Once rice becomes widely reported within the archaeobotanic record, there is long term evidence for low impact agrarian practices across the subcontinent, including shifting cultivation, lasting up to 5000 years until domestic rice agriculture became widely adopted. This presentation will sum up archaeological and genetic evidence for rice domestication in India and outline the pathway to domestic rice agriculture that the current data supports, a pathway which is almost uniquely protracted and muddled.

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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