Abstract
Rice can be cultivated in a range of arable systems, including upland rainfed, lowland rainfed or irrigated, flooded or décrue, and deep water cultivation. These agricultural regimes represent ecosystems controlled to large degree by agricultural practices, and can be shown to produce different weed flora assemblages. In order to reconstruct early rice cultivation systems it is necessary to better establish how ancient rice farming practices may be seen using archaeobotanical data. This paper focuses on using modern analogue phytolith assemblages of associated crop weeds found within cultivation regimes, as well as in wild rice stands (unplanted stands of Oryza nivara or Oryza rufipogon), as a means of interpreting archaeobotanical assemblages. Rice weeds and sediment samples have been recorded and collected from a range of arable systems and wild stands in India. The husks, leaves and culms of associated weeds were processed for phytolith reference samples, and sediment samples were processed for phytoliths in order to establish patterns identifiable to specific systems. The preliminary results of the phytolith analysis of samples from these modern fields demonstrate that phytolith assemblage statistics show correlation with variation in rice cultivation systems on the basis of differences in environmental conditions and regimes, with wetness being one major factor. Analysis of phytoliths from archaeological samples from contrasting systems in Neolithic China and India demonstrate how this method can be applied to separate archaeological regions and periods based on inferred differences in past agricultural practices, identifying wet cultivation systems in China, dry millet-dominated agriculture of north China and rainfed/dry rice in Neolithic India.
Highlights
Rice has provided the dietary staple for a large proportion of the world’s population since the earliest civilizations in Southern China, Southeast Asia and large parts of India and Sri Lanka (Fuller et al, 2010; Castillo and Fuller, 2010)
In this paper we report the patterning of data in modern soil phytolith assemblages from different rice systems, both cultivated and wild, from an initial analysis of nine rice fields
Among Chinese samples, samples from sites with millet fall on the upper portion of Axis 2, while among Indian samples, sites without with evidence for rice or any crops fall at the lower end of Axis 2
Summary
Rice has provided the dietary staple for a large proportion of the world’s population since the earliest civilizations in Southern China, Southeast Asia and large parts of India and Sri Lanka (Fuller et al, 2010; Castillo and Fuller, 2010). Understanding how rice production systems evolved and intensified is fundamental to the archaeology of early civilizations in monsoonal Asia (Gourou, 1984; Bray, 1994; Glover and Higham, 1996). When and how rice farming began, and the nature of its early impact on the landscape and demands on human labour, are key issues in the long-term history of Asia. One of the weaknesses in existing data is that archaeological evidence for how rice was cultivated, in wet or dry systems, is extremely scarce. One of our major aims has been to develop new systematic methods for inferring how rice was cultivated in the past (Fuller and Weisskopf, 2011). The statistical analysis of archaeological phytolith (biogenic silica) assemblages provides one approach, and we report results here from analyses of modern analogue soil phytoliths and some archaeological assemblages
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