Developing a Legacy Collection of Traditional Rice Cultivation: Implications for Archaeobotanical Study

Summary

Legacy ethnobotanical collections have untapped potential to elucidate human-plant relationships through time and space. This paper examines a subset of a comprehensive ethnobotanical collection undertaken in 1979-1981 in northeast Thailand. The subset comprises 43 traditional rice cultivars and wild forms, each collected along with detailed information about cultivar-specific uses and growing conditions. Our study includes morphometric examination of grains and spikelet bases with the objective of documenting variability within both individual spikes and across the species continuum. Ultimately this examination provides a platform for thinking about domestication processes in the past and interrelationships between wild and cultivated forms, particularly when considering harvesting times and field conditions. These data and this legacy collection can be used as a comparative for archaeobotanical assemblages as well as future genetic studies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Seeds of the Past, Seeds of the Future: Papers in Honor of Steven A. Weber

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 13289