The southern Central Asian mountains as an ancient agricultural mixing zone: new archaeobotanical data from Barikot in t
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
The southern Central Asian mountains as an ancient agricultural mixing zone: new archaeobotanical data from Barikot in the Swat valley of Pakistan Robert N. Spengler III1 · Li Tang1 · Ayushi Nayak1 · Nicole Boivin1,2,3,4 · Luca Maria Olivieri5,6 Received: 24 April 2020 / Accepted: 16 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The mountain foothills of inner Asia have served as a corridor of communication and exchange for at least five millennia, using historically documented trade routes such as the Silk Road and the Tea-Horse Road. Recent research has illustrated the important role that this mountain corridor played in the dispersal of crops and farming technology between northeast and southwest Asia 5,000 to 1,000 years ago. However, the role of the mountain valleys along the southern rim of the Pamirs and Himalaya in facilitating crop dispersals has not yet been fully explored. Notably, ongoing debates over secondary dispersals of Hordeum (barley) and Triticum (wheat) into China and the routes of dispersal for the East Asian crops Oryza sativa (rice), Prunus persica (peach) and P. armeniaca (apricot) into northern India are continuing topics of inquiry. In this article, we add to these discussions by focusing on archaeobotanical remains from the Barikot site (ca. 1200 bce–50 ce) in the Swat valley of northern Pakistan. The Swat valley is an ancient settlement zone in the Hindu Kush-Karakoram foothills, whose cultural features have always had a strong link with inner Asia. The archaeobotanical assemblage illustrates that a diverse array of crops, with origins across Asia, were cultivated around the same settlement. Additionally, these farmers likely implemented seasonal cropping cycles and irrigation that required various labour inputs and water management regimes. Keywords Crop rotation cycles · Archaeobotany · Swat valley · Irrigation · Rice · Northern pakistan
Introduction Human populations around the world congregate in biologically rich ecotonal zones; as such, mountain foothills often represent cultural hotspots (Turner et al. 2011). Communicated by F. Bittmann. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-020-00798-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Robert N. Spengler III [email protected] 1
Department of Archaeology, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Kahlaischestr. 10, 07745 Jena, Germany
2
School of Social Science, The University of Queensland, Level 2, Michie Building (9), St Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia
3
Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Calgary, 2500 University Dr. NW, Calgary, AB T2N 1NH, Canada
Archaeological research across inner Asia has consistently shown high human population density throughout these ecotones between hills and lowlands, especially in river valleys or alluvial floodplains (Spengler et al. 2013; Frachetti et al. 2018). These river valleys have served as agricultural experimentation zones for mi
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