Abstract
Archaeobotanical research in East and Southeast Asia provides evidence for transitions between lower and higher productivity forms of rice. These shifts in productivity are argued to help explain patterns in the domestication process and the rise of urban societies in these regions. The domestication process, which is now documented as having taken a few millennia, and coming to an end between 6700 and 5900 bp, involved several well documented changes, all of which served to increase the yield of rice harvests by an estimated 366 per cent; this increase provides an in-built pull factor for domestication. Once domesticated, rice diversified into higher productivity, labour-demanding wet rice and lower-yield dry rice. While wet rice in the Lower Yangtze region of China provided a basis for increasing population density and social hierarchy, it was the development of less productive and less demanding dry rice that helped to propel the migrations of farmers and the spread of rice agriculture across South China and Southeast Asia. Later intensification in Southeast Asia, a shift back to wet rice, was a necessary factor for increasing hierarchy and urbanisation in regions such as Thailand.
Highlights
Rice has featured in the agriculture of South, East and Southeast Asia since prehistoric times and has supported many early urban cultures from the Yangtze valley of China through all the major rivers of Southeast Asia, as well as much of India and Sri Lanka
While wet rice in the Lower Yangtze region of China provided a basis for increasing population density and social hierarchy, it was the development of less productive and less demanding dry rice that helped to propel the migrations of farmers and the spread of rice agriculture across South China and Southeast Asia
This highlights the significance of the ecological spectrum between the wet and dry ecologies of rice cultivation, and transitions in both directions have been a feature of the history of rice cultivation in southern China, Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent which we are better able to outline (Kingwell-Banham 2019; Qin and Fuller 2019)
Summary
The earliest archaeological evidence for rice farming comes from the Yangtze basin in China, where domesticated rice is present in the middle Yangtze by perhaps 8000 bp (Deng et al 2015). Multiple factors interacting, including changes inherent to the process, must be considered (Fuller et al 2016; Zeder 2017) One of these inherent pull factors is an increasing rate of return per unit of land cultivated and unit of labour expended that result from the plant evolving domestication traits. In terms of losing its natural seed dispersal, wild harvests would have included many unfilled or immature grains, while the transition to non-shattering allowed all these grains to stay on the plant until harvest, an estimated boost to returns of around 50 per cent Domestication trait Wild type Improved Percentage Source yield domestic increase type yield
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