Abstract
Four decades have passed since Harlan and Stemler (1976) proposed the eastern Sahelian zone as the most likely center of Sorghum bicolor domestication. Recently, new data on seed impressions on Butana Group pottery, from the fourth millennium BC in the southern Atbai region of the far eastern Sahelian Belt in Africa, show evidence for cultivation activities of sorghum displaying some domestication traits. Pennisetum glaucum may have been undergoing domestication shortly thereafter in the western Sahel, as finds of fully domesticated pearl millet are present in southeastern Mali by the second half of the third millennium BC, and present in eastern Sudan by the early second millennium BC. The dispersal of the latter to India took less than 1000 years according to present data. Here, we review the middle Holocene Sudanese archaeological data for the first time, to situate the origins and spread of these two native summer rainfall cereals in what is proposed to be their eastern Sahelian Sudan gateway to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean trade.
Highlights
Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) and pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum) formed an integral part of the caloric base of most Neolithic and Iron Age foodproducing societies in the Sahelian belt (Bourlag 1996; Harlan 1992) and, beyond the scope of this paper, elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa
In light of new evidence that has begun to place the domestication processes of both cereals in time and space, we re-assess the early evidence of these crops within the context of the mid-Holocene and Neolithic cultural traditions of Sahelian Sudan, which we model as having played key roles in sorghum domestication and pearl millet dispersal
No artifactual indicators of cultivation were present at that period, we might infer the earliest experiments with sorghum cultivation to have begun given that sorghum domestication is a slow, ongoing process and domesticated sorghum is present in the successor Butana Group
Summary
Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) and pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum) formed an integral part of the caloric base of most Neolithic and Iron Age foodproducing societies in the Sahelian belt (Bourlag 1996; Harlan 1992) and, beyond the scope of this paper, elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa. The aims of this paper are twofold: first to provide the regional archaeological context in which sorghum domestication can be framed, and second, to consider the eastern Sudan as the gateway through which both domesticated sorghum and pearl millet passed en route to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade networks Both cereals played and play an important traditional role in Asia, especially in India, where they became established as crops between 4000 and 3500 years ago (Boivin and Fuller 2009; Fuller 2003). Across the southern part of the Sahara, during the wetter early Holocene, hunter-gatherer groups gathered a wide suite of native savanna grasses, or wild millets, including Brachiaria spp., Digitaria spp., Echinochloa spp., Setaria spp., Sorghum spp., Urochloa spp., and more occasionally Pennisetum (Barakat and Fahmy 1999; Barich et al 2014; Mercuri 2001, 2008; Mercuri et al 2018; Stemler 1990a, b; Wasylikowa 1992; Wasylikowa and Dahlberg 1999) It was among such communities that ceramics appeared as a food processing technology, by ca. It was among such communities that ceramics appeared as a food processing technology, by ca. 8000 BC (Close 1995; Garcea 1998, 2005; Huysecom et al 2009; Jesse 2003)
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