Editorial: the archaeobotany of early rice agriculture in Asia

Abstract

Rice is the staple food par excellence of East Asia and themost densely populated landscapes of China, Korea, Japan,Southeast Asia, and South Asia. The origins and spread ofrice and the intensification of rice farming is oftenconnected to the development of civilization and ancientstates in many parts of this region (Gorou 1984; Bray1994). While it is widely accepted that China was anindependent centre of plant domestication (Bellwood 2005;Barker 2006) and rice was one of its major domesticatedcrops, the origins of agriculture has received less problem-oriented research than in regions like the Near East orMesoamerica. Much discussion of agricultural origins hashad a Western bias, focusing on the origins of wheat, or inAmerica maize, and research by Western scholars on theorigins of these crops.In Japanese scholarship, there has long been an emphasisplaced on the divergent traditions of agriculture, environ-ment and culture in western and eastern Eurasia. Onesource of this thinking is the early twentieth centuryphilosopher Watsuji and his concept of a link betweenclimate and culture (Watsuji 1921, 1961). Watsuji devel-oped a concept of Fudo (“climatic zones”), drawing adistinction between the environment, agricultural traditionsand nature of human cultures between Western Eurasia, thezone of mugi (the cereals including wheats and barley) andthe zone of rice and monsoons in Eastern Asia. Watsuji’sinference was that at opposite ends of Eurasia there havebeen long histories of different traditions of cultural impacton the environments, understandings of the environmentand subsistence. Indeed, the accumulated evidence ofarchaeology suggests that post-Palaeolithic trajectories inEast and West Asia were quite different, with varyingemphases on grinding and bread-making in the west, wherewheat and barley were domesticated, and more technologydevoted in boiling and steaming in the east where rice andsome millets were domesticated (Fuller and Rowlands2009). It remains the case, however, that our understandingof agricultural origins and plant domestication in East Asiais far less well-documented and understood by comparisonto West Asia, and the work represented in this volumecontributes towards increasing parity.The dispersal of rice farming is often seen as pivotal inthe population history of East and Southeast Asia and islinked to the establishment of sedentism and the spread ofmajor language families (Bellwood 2005). Previous syn-theses have more often been based on cultural historicalarchaeology rather than archaeological science, pots ratherthan the evidence of plants themselves. In recent years, agreat deal of new data and new ideas on the origin of riceagriculture in China and its diffusion through East andSoutheast Asia has emerged. This is due in part to thegrowth of systematic archaeobotany in East Asia, withflotation now being practised more often in China andKorea, where such methods were rarely deployed in theregion a decade ago. New genetic data have also forcedreconsiderations of the existing models of the number oforigins and trajectories of spread of rice agriculture. Newdebates about the number of origins and where they werehave emerged from genetic inferences (e.g. Kovach et al.2007; Fuller and Sato 2008; Vaughan et al. 2008; Zhang etal 2009; Izawa et al. 2009). Genetics is also increasinglyproviding information on the particular genes that underlie