Archaeobotanical remains from the mid-first millennium AD site of Kaerdong in western Tibet
- PDF / 1,852,409 Bytes
- 12 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 73 Downloads / 205 Views
ORIGINAL PAPER
Archaeobotanical remains from the mid-first millennium AD site of Kaerdong in western Tibet Jixiang Song 1 & Hongliang Lu 1
&
Zhengwei Zhang 2 & Xinyi Liu 2
Received: 19 January 2017 / Accepted: 8 June 2017 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany 2017
Abstract In this study, we present the preliminary result of archaeobotanical investigation at Kaerdong in western Tibet. The result shows that agropastoralism with combined strategies of foraging, hunting and fishing was in practice at the location between approximately 455 and 700 cal. AD. Our results also show that herding animals grazed at meadows above 4300 m above sea level (masl), and dung was used as fuel. The presence of a rice grain together with spikelet bases indicates that rice was a component of food resources possibly as a result of a trade and exchange system. In addition, tatary buckwheat grains were also recovered at the site. Keywords Agropastoralism . Tibet . Archaeobotany . Trade/exchange . Animal dung
Introduction There has been an increasing interest in archaeobotanical research in Tibet in recent years (Fu 1997, 2001; Fu et al. 2000; d’ A Guedes et al. 2014, 2015a, b; d’ A Guedes 2015, 2016; d’ A Guedes and Butler 2014; Chen et al. 2015; Dong et al. 2015). Previous studies are very helpful and have clarified some situations such as the timing of the spread of agriculture to the environmentally less hospitable high elevation plateau * Hongliang Lu [email protected]
1
Department of Archaeology, Center for Archaeological Science, Sichuan University, 29 Wangjiang Road, Chengdu 610064, Sichuan, People’s Republic of China
2
Department of Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, USA
and the role and the mechanism of the introduction of western domesticates to the plateau. The discussions are either based on regional archaeological surveys (Chen et al. 2015; Dong et al. 2015) or a combination of published data and limited new data from specific sites (d’ A Guedes et al. 2014) and generally dealt with agricultural evolution and model building of crop production in Tibet as a whole (Chen et al. 2015; Dong et al. 2015; d’ A Guedes et al. 2014, 2015a, b; d’ A Guedes 2015, 2016; d’ A Guedes and Butler 2014). However, the local ecology is quite diverse so research in a specific area is not necessarily applicable to all of Tibet (Lu 2016). Even in the region where our site is located, there are different microenvironments. The river valleys are warmer and wetter where limited cultivation can be practiced while in the upper mountains no crops can be cultivated. In addition, much of the previous research tends to neglect weeds and wild seeds (e.g. Chen et al. 2015; Fu 1997, 2001) which are important for the understanding of human-plant relationships. Therefore, detailed and systematic research on specific sites in Tibet is necessary for a full understanding of the subsistence strategy of specific populations. Three flotation samples were previously collected from Kaerdong (455–700 cal. AD) in 2004 and the archaeobotanical a
Data Loading...
