The first discovery of Neolithic rice remains in eastern Taiwan: phytolith evidence from the Chaolaiqiao site
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ORIGINAL PAPER
The first discovery of Neolithic rice remains in eastern Taiwan: phytolith evidence from the Chaolaiqiao site Zhenhua Deng 1 & Hsiao-chun Hung 2 & Mike T. Carson 3 & Peter Bellwood 4 & Shu-ling Yang 5 & Houyuan Lu 1,6,7
Received: 10 October 2016 / Accepted: 23 January 2017 # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2017
Abstract Located in the key junction between mainland China and Island Southeast Asia, Taiwan is of great significance for our understanding of the southeastward dispersal of rice agriculture in the prehistoric period. Until now, quite limited archaeobotanical work has been done in this region. In eastern Taiwan, no archaeological evidence of rice agriculture has been obtained, probably owing to the poor preservation conditions for plant macroremains. Here, we report a new discovery of 4200-year-old domesticated rice remains at the Chaolaiqiao site, which for the first time in detail demonstrates the ancient practice of rice agriculture in this area. Based on a combination of factors that include a rice-based plant subsistence strategy, the mid-Holocene limits to available farmland and the fast-growing Taiwan Neolithic population from settlement pattern data, we infer that this contradiction in eastern Taiwan between land-dependent agriculture and limited suitable farmland encouraged a population movement out of Taiwan during the Middle Neolithic period. * Zhenhua Deng [email protected]
1
Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China
2
Department of Archaeology and Natural History, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia
3
Micronesian Area Research Center, University of Guam, 303 University Drive, UOG Station, Mangilao, Guam 96913, USA
4
School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University, ACT, Canberra 2601, Australia
5
National Museum of Prehistory, Taidong 95060, Taiwan
6
Center for Excellence in Tibetan Plateau Earth Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China
7
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
Keywords Domesticated rice . Agriculture dispersal . Phytolith . Eastern Taiwan
Introduction As one of the most important staple foods in the world, rice has played a significant role in the development of the ancient societies of monsoon Asia. With the accumulation of sites bearing archaeobotanical data in South, Southeast, and East Asia, great progress has been made just within the last decade on the origin and dispersal of rice farming (Fuller et al. 2009; Fuller 2011; Silva et al. 2015; Stevens et al. 2016). Nevertheless, limited evidence has been obtained on the southeastward spread of rice into the island regions of Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia, where rice is the major daily food today. It is generally accepted that rice spread from mainland southern China into Taiwan and then into other islands (Bellwood 2005; Zhang and Hung 2010; Fuller 2011). However, chronologies suffer from a scarcity of hard evidence. Taiwan, located in the p
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