The Social Landscape of Rice within Vegecultural Systems in Borneo

Abstract

The papers by Hayden (2009, in this issue) and Pearsall (2009, in this issue) highlight the importance of our understanding, to quote Pearsall, of the social landscapes in which early agriculture and intensive agriculture occurred and, it could be added, of contexts (e.g., Australia) in which agriculture did not occur. While the enormous transformations of societies that adopted agriculture are obvious, the actual nature of those transformations remains poorly understood, and at a global scale we must consider that the trajectories toward seed-based systems of plant food production and those associated with vegecultural practices in the tropics of Africa, Southeast Asia, Melanesia, and the Neotropics may have been very different. This response is an attempt to think about both social and economic motivations behind the manipulation of plants and food production. In particular, I want to consider the circumstances under which a rice-based system of agriculture might have been adopted in tropical Southeast Asia by hunter-gatherers already engaged in some form of plant management or vegeculture. Pearsall notes that the Neotropics might be the ideal place to investigate agricultural origins through human-environment relationships on a landscape scale. Paleoenvironmental records there include deep sedimentary cores from periods predating human occupation and include good proxies of human-induced disturbance such as long-term fire records and pollen and phytolith sequences. Similar claims might also be made for the tropics of Southeast Asia. Human occupation of the rainforests of Borneo is now dated to at least 45,000 years ago (Barker et al. 2007; Higham et al. 2009), and fire records may indicate a human presence as early as 60,000 years ago in southern Indonesia (Dam, van der Kaars, and Kershaw 2001). Southeast Asia also provides a rather unique context in which to hypothesize about the long-term consequences of people-plant interactions; the emergence of vegeculture and possible independent domestication of a wide variety of tubers, rhizomes, and trees (Barton and Denham, forthcoming; Barton and Paz 2007; Denham and Barton 2006); and the hypothesized rapid introduction of a completely novel mode of plant food production based on the freproduction of a short-lived annual, rice (see Bellwood 2009, in this issue). For example, it is still argued that agriculture did not occur in Island Southeast Asia until after the expansion of rice-farming peoples into the region during the midHolocene (Bellwood 2009). However, this seems increasingly harder to support in light of the archaeological and genetic evidence that shows that the earlier foraging groups may have been actively engaged in the manipulation of several species through vegecultural systems of plant propagation (Barton and Denham, forthcoming; Denham and Barton 2006). It seems likely that rice and its associated systems of propagation were adopted by peoples already heavily engaged in their own systems of plant management, some of which may have already produced domesticates such as the greater yam Dioscorea alata, taro Colocasia esculenta, and bananas Musa spp. (Carreel et al. 2002; De Langhe and de Maret 1999; Lebot et al. 2004). It also seems likely that the transition toward the reliance of rice as a food staple after its mid-Holocene introduction was still occurring in recent prehistory. Even as late as the early twentieth century in parts of Southeast Asia where rice held center stage as a plant of social preeminence, this did not necessarily reflect its role in daily subsistence. Among many groups in interior Borneo, rice remained a relatively minor crop—supplementing other starchy staples, frequently roots that could be grown in greater quantity and that were considered more reliable come harvest (Harrisson 1949, 142). Among the Dusun of North Borneo, though rice was planted by all tribes, it was considered supplementary to a diet of taro and imported South American cultivars such as cassava, sugar cane, and maize (Rutter 1929, 75). Wild fruits and sago were also considerably important, though the latter more so in the swampy lowlands (Rutter 1929, 96), suggesting that it may be the introduced swamp sago Metroxylon sagu Rott. (the timing of this introduction remains unknown, but the original range of this palm was not westward of the Molluccas; Flach 1997). Root crops and