Editorial: the archaeobotany of early rice agriculture in Asia
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EDITORIAL
Editorial: the archaeobotany of early rice agriculture in Asia Leo Aoi Hosoya & Yo-Ichiro Sato & Dorian Q. Fuller
Published online: 8 June 2010 # Springer-Verlag 2010
Rice is the staple food par excellence of East Asia and the most densely populated landscapes of China, Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. The origins and spread of rice and the intensification of rice farming is often connected to the development of civilization and ancient states in many parts of this region (Gorou 1984; Bray 1994). While it is widely accepted that China was an independent centre of plant domestication (Bellwood 2005; Barker 2006) and rice was one of its major domesticated crops, the origins of agriculture has received less problemoriented research than in regions like the Near East or Mesoamerica. Much discussion of agricultural origins has had a Western bias, focusing on the origins of wheat, or in America maize, and research by Western scholars on the origins of these crops. In Japanese scholarship, there has long been an emphasis placed on the divergent traditions of agriculture, environment and culture in western and eastern Eurasia. One source of this thinking is the early twentieth century philosopher Watsuji and his concept of a link between climate and culture (Watsuji 1921, 1961). Watsuji developed a concept of Fudo (“climatic zones”), drawing a distinction between the environment, agricultural traditions and nature of human cultures between Western Eurasia, the zone of mugi (the cereals including wheats and barley) and the zone of rice and monsoons in Eastern Asia. Watsuji’s inference was that at opposite ends of Eurasia there have L. A. Hosoya : Y.-I. Sato Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Kyoto, Japan D. Q. Fuller (*) University College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]
been long histories of different traditions of cultural impact on the environments, understandings of the environment and subsistence. Indeed, the accumulated evidence of archaeology suggests that post-Palaeolithic trajectories in East and West Asia were quite different, with varying emphases on grinding and bread-making in the west, where wheat and barley were domesticated, and more technology devoted in boiling and steaming in the east where rice and some millets were domesticated (Fuller and Rowlands 2009). It remains the case, however, that our understanding of agricultural origins and plant domestication in East Asia is far less well-documented and understood by comparison to West Asia, and the work represented in this volume contributes towards increasing parity. The dispersal of rice farming is often seen as pivotal in the population history of East and Southeast Asia and is linked to the establishment of sedentism and the spread of major language families (Bellwood 2005). Previous syntheses have more often been based on cultural historical archaeology rather than archaeological science, pots rather than the evidence of plants themselves. In recent years, a great deal of new data and new ideas on the or
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