Unentangling Hotspots and Episodes in Pre-domestication Cultivation of Cereals: Examples from West and East Asia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The growth of empirical archaeobotanical data has highlighted that domestication processes in cereals were spread out over both time (millennia) and space (100,000s rather than 10,000s of km2). Updated data from West Asian cereals and pulses, alongside Chinese millets and rice, are analyzed. These data allow quantification of amounts of change and rates of change in cereal non-shattering and/or seed size increase, which provide a basis for identifying shorter episodes of more rapid evolution for each trait or species. These rapid sub-episodes can be placed in space and cultural context. This in turn raises new question about which changes in practices or environmental conditions may be regarded as contributory. It can suggest that increasing reliance on crops over wild foods correlated with periods in which domestication sped up, but this correlates with sedentism in China and the advent of animal herding in West Asia, indicating contrasts between pathways.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36062.0