Linguistic evidence supports a long antiquity of cultivation of barley and buckwheat over that of millet and rice in Eas
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Linguistic evidence supports a long antiquity of cultivation of barley and buckwheat over that of millet and rice in Eastern Bhutan Gwendolyn Hyslop1 · Jade d’Alpoim‑Guedes2 Received: 13 January 2020 / Accepted: 23 October 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Little is known about the prehistoric domestication and cultivation of crops in the Eastern Himalayas (eastern Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh), due to a lack of archaeological and archaeobotanical research in the area. This paper reconstructs the lexical terminology for grains in the East Bodish language sub-family in Eastern Bhutan. Historical linguistic methods suggest that the immediate ancestors of the modern East Bodish speakers cultivated buckwheat (Fagopyrum) and barley (Hordeum) but not millets or rice. Buckwheat was traditionally thought to have been domesticated in Southwest China; however, this research reveals that cultivation (and potentially subsequent domestication) may have taken place among East Bodish language speakers or their ancestors. These findings also pose a challenge for studies which seek to reconstruct millets to ancestral Tibeto-Burman speaking populations. Keywords Tibeto-Burman · Eastern Himalayas · Millets · Buckwheat · Bhutan
Introduction One pressing line of enquiry that bears directly on the study of human prehistory and population movements is the domestication of various grains and their subsequent spread across the globe. Little is known about the history of crop introduction and domestication in eastern Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh, as to date archaeobotanical research has not yet been carried out in the area. Within the context of Asia, rice (Oryza sativa) and millets (broomcorn millet, Panicum miliaceum, and foxtail millet, Setaria italica) are the most discussed (see Fuller et al. 2009, for example, for some useful discussion regarding the domestication of rice and Hunt et al. 2008; Barton et al. 2009; Liu et al. 2009; Lu et al. 2009; for discussion of the domestication of millets). Other crops such as buckwheat (Fagopyrum spp.) Communicated by A. Fairbairn. * Gwendolyn Hyslop [email protected] 1
The University of Sydney, A20 ‑ John Woolley Building, Camperdown, NSW 2006, Australia
Department of Anthropology, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, 8615 Kennel Way, San Diego (La Jolla), CA 92037‑0212, USA
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have, however, received less attention. In the eastern Himalayas (eastern Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh), the ethnographic record shows many modern groups making ample use of different species of millet, however the antiquity of their use is unclear due to a lack of archaeological and archaeobotanical investigation in the region. Observations in different communities throughout the eastern Himalayan regions suggest that different groups use a variety of grains as part of their daily diet including, but not limited to, finger millet (Eleusine coracana), broomcorn mi
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