Cereals, calories and change: exploring approaches to quantification in Indus archaeobotany
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Cereals, calories and change: exploring approaches to quantification in Indus archaeobotany J. Bates 1,2 & C.A. Petrie 1,3 & R.N. Singh 4
Received: 23 March 2016 / Accepted: 10 March 2017 # The Author(s) 2017. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Abstract Several major cereal groups have been identified as staples used by the pre-urban, urban and post-urban phase populations of the Indus Civilisation (3200–1500 BCE): wheat, barley, a range of small hulled millets and also rice, though their proportional exploitation is variable across space and over time. Traditional quantification methods examine the frequency, intensity and proportionality of the use of these crops and help ascertain the ‘relative importance’ of these cereals for Indus populations. However, this notion of ‘importance’ is abstracted from the daily lives of the people using these crops and may be biased by the differential production (as well as archaeological survival) of individual cereals. This paper outlines an alternative approach to quantifying Indus cereals by investigating proportions of calories. Cereals are predominantly composed of carbohydrates and therefore provided much of the daily caloric intake among many late Holocene farming populations. The four major cereal groups cultivated by Indus farmers, however, vary greatly in terms of calories per grain, and this has an impact on their proportional input to past diets. This paper demonstrates that, when converted Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s12520-017-0489-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * J. Bates [email protected]
1
McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3ER, UK
2
Selwyn College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 9DQ, UK
3
Division of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3DZ, UK
4
Department of AIHC and Archaeology, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India
to proportions of calories, the perceived ‘importance’ of cereals from five Indus sites changes dramatically, reducing the role of the previously dominant small hulled millet species and elevating the role of Triticoid grains. Although other factors will also have affected how a farmer perceived the role and importance of a crop, including its ecological tolerances, investments required to grow it, and the crop’s role in the economy, this papers suggests that some consideration of what cereals meant in terms of daily lives is needed alongside the more abstracted quantification methods that have traditionally been applied. Keywords Indus Civilisation . Plant macroremains . South Asia . Bronze age . Calories . Quantification
Introduction The role of agriculture in South Asia’s Indus Civilisation (3200– 1300 BCE) (Table 1, Fig. 1) is a growing area of research. As in most complex societies, food production was integral to all aspects of the society and economy of the Indus Civilisation, po
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