Agricultural systems in Bangladesh: the first archaeobotanical results from Early Historic Wari-Bateshwar and Early Medieval Vikrampura

Abstract

The present paper reports the first systematic archaeobotanical evidence from Bangladesh together with direct AMS radiocarbon dates on crop remains. Macro-botanical remains were collected by flotation from two sites, Wari-Bateshwar (WB), an Early Historic archaeological site, dating mainly between 400 and 100 BC, with a later seventh century AD temple complex, and Raghurampura Vikrampura (RV), a Buddhist Monastery (vihara) located within the Vikrampura city site complex and dating to the eleventh and sixteenth centuries AD. Despite being a tropical country, with high rainfall and intensive soil processes, our work demonstrates that conventional archaeobotany, the collection of macro-remains through flotation, has much potential towards putting together a history of crops and agricultural systems in Bangladesh. The archaeobotanical assemblage collected from both sites indicates the predominance of rice agriculture, which would have been practiced in summer. Spikelet bases are of domesticated type rice, while grain metrics suggest the majority of rice was probably subspecies japonica. The presence of some wetland weeds suggests at least some of the rice was grown in wet (flooded) systems, but much of it may have been rainfed as inferred from the Southeast Asian weed Acmella paniculata. Other crops include winter cereals, barley and possible oat, and small numbers of summer millets (Pennisetum glaucum, Sorghum bicolor, Setaria italica), a wide diversity of summer and winter pulses (14 spp.), cotton, sesame and mustard seed. Pulse crops included many known from India. Thus, while most crops indicate diffusion of crops from India eastwards, the absence of indica rice could also indicate some diffusion from Southeast Asia. The later site RV also produced evidence of the rice bean (Vigna umbellata), a domesticate of mainland Southeast Asia. These data provide the first empirical evidence for reconstructing past agriculture in Bangladesh and for the role of connections to both India and mainland Southeast Asia in the development of crop diversity in the Ganges delta region.

Genomic insights into the origin, domestication and diversification of Brassica juncea

“…e , Putative spread routes of B. juncea . Archaeological evidence showing that seed cakes or carbonized mustard seeds were excavated from Jerf el Ahmar (9500–8700 BC) 54 , Banpo site (about 4800 BC) 55 , Harappa (2400–1700 BC) 59 , Raja-Nal-ka-Tila site (1300–700 BC) 60 , Wari-Bateshwa (400–100 BC) 61 and Mawangdui site (about 138 BC) 64 . The geographic map was adapted from NASA ( https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/images/147190/explorer-base-map/147191w/ ).…”

“…In parallel, the G3 mustard spread from southern Afghanistan into the Indian subcontinent 12 where it was domesticated into Indian mustard (G6), which is supported by archaeological excavations 59 . Indian mustard then spread eastward 60 , 61 to form a new type of broad-leaf mustard (var. rugosa ) 13 , probably around 300 BC 62 .…”

A tale of two rice varieties: Modelling the prehistoric dispersals ofjaponicaand proto-indicarices

“…1650 BC; Fuller, 2011b), Gopalpur and Golbai Sassan in eastern India (ca. 1250 BC; Kingwell-Banham, 2015), Wari-Bateshwar in Bangladesh after 400 BC (Rahman et al, in press), Paithan in south India after 300 BC (Fuller, in press) and in northern Sri Lanka at Mantai after 100 BC (Kingwell-Banham, 2015) and Kantharodai after 150 BC (Murphy et al, 2018; Figure 8). In the case of the eastern Indian site, the occurrences of domesticated rice, and indeed the foundation of these sites based on available radiocarbon dates, are fairly close to the predicted arrival date of domesticated indica , at most ca.…”

Vicissitudes experienced by the oldest urban center in Bangladesh in relation to the migration of the Brahmaputra River

“…2). The ~2.3 ka bp age was consistent with published 14 C ages (Table 3; Rahman, 2007; Rahman et al ., 2019, 2020), and is therefore most likely to represent the burial age of the sediment. The age of Sample CWB17‐20 is most probably an underestimate.…”