Pluvial and Fluvial: Investigating the Environmental Resistance and Driving Force of Wheat Cropping in the Central Plain of China

Summary

This is an abstract from the "From Tangible Things to Intangible Ideas: The Context of Pan-Eurasian Exchange of Crops and Objects" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent archaeological evidence suggests that wheat, one of the most important grain crops originating in the Near East, was introduced into the Central Plain of China as early as approximately 4,000 BP. However, it is not until around 2,000 BP or even later that wheat was widely cultivated and consumed. Why was there a two-thousand-year gap between the earliest emergence and widespread cultivation? And why was wheat eventually accepted by the Central Plain inhabitants? These questions have attracted but also puzzled archaeologists for a long time. Although cultural and culinary traditions may play a significant role in resistance and acceptance, this research mainly focuses on environmental factors. We first compare the pluvial patterns of the Mediterranean climatic zone with the East Asia Monsoon zone, and investigate variance in rain fall pattern as a factor in the resistance of wheat cropping in the Central Plain of China. The study then reconstructs the fluvial sequence in the lower reaches of the Yellow River and investigates the increasingly frequent Yellow River floods as the driving force of wheat cropping in the China's Central Plain.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From Tangible Things to Intangible Ideas: The Context of Pan-Eurasian Exchange of Crops and Objects   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25821