Archaeobotanical Studies at Suabarei, Puri District, Odisha, India

Naik, Satish S.; Patnaik, J. K.; Kingwell-Banham, Eleanor; Murphy, Charlene; Fuller, Dorian Q.

doi:10.18520/cs/v116/i8/1373-1380

Cited by 4 publications

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“…Kantharodai), which tend to indicate more indica dominant or mixed populations (see Fig. 8; Castillo et al 2016b;Murphy et al 2018;Naik et al 2019). Early rice in Myanmar represented by impressions in bricks that may date back as early as the final centuries BC at Htaukmagon and Taungthaman also suggest shorter-grained japonica types (Watanabe and Tanaka 1981).…”

Section: Rice: Spikelet Bases Morphometrics and Varietymentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Rahman

Castillo

Murphy

et al. 2020

Archaeol Anthropol Sci

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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.

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Section: Rice: Spikelet Bases Morphometrics and Varietymentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Rahman

Castillo

Murphy

et al. 2020

Archaeol Anthropol Sci

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“…More information on associated weeds of cultivation is needed to look at how these plants might have been tended or even grown. Weed analysis on early rice in South Asia is rare, with only later period assessments, for example, by , looking at changes across the hypothesized japonica hybridization period as an example, and studies on the Indus looking at rice agricultural systems (Bates et al, 2017a) being examples of this [refer also to Morrison, 2016;Kingwell-Banham et al, 2018;Naik et al, 2019;in south and east and Wolff et al (2022) for a discussion of the state of study on weeds in archeology]. Phytoliths have been used to look at weed floras associated with changing rice watering regimes in China and Odisha (Weisskopf et al, 2014(Weisskopf et al, , 2015 but have yet to be applied to Gangetic rice domestication periods.…”

Section: The Gap Between Datasets: How the Different Proxies Used Imp...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Fits and Starts of Indian Rice Domestication: How the Movement of Rice Across Northwest India Impacted Domestication Pathways and Agricultural Stories

Bates

2022

Front. Ecol. Evol.

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Rice is currently the staple food for over 3.5 billion people and is arguably the most important crop exploited by humans. Understanding how we came to the point where a single crop dominates the lives of almost half of the Earth’s population has major significance for our future, even more so given the climatic instability we face today, as rice is a cereal that is dependent on water to an extreme degree. In this study, the nature of early rice agriculture in South Asia is explored, looking at how this critical crop may have begun to be exploited, cultivated, and then brought under agricultural regimes during the long span between c.6500 and 1500 BC. There is now clear evidence for early Holocene cultivation of rice in the Middle Gangetic plains of northern India, but there is still considerable debate about the timing of when this cultivation began and whether it involved domestication of rice. By 3200 BC, however, rice agriculture was present outside the Ganges in the Indus Civilization. The data show accelerated domestication in the Indus environment and agricultural systems that played a part in later hybridization with the arrival of Chinese rice. Understanding how this move from its place of origin to a new environment may have become entangled in the domestication pathways of South Asia rice prior to the arrival of Chinese rice c.1500 BC are important to the overall rice story, as they play into modern concerns relating to biodiversity and different ways of growing and watering rice.

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Asia, South: Neolithic

Fuller

Hollander

2024

Encyclopedia of Archaeology (Second Edition)

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Archaeobotanical Studies at Suabarei, Puri District, Odisha, India

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

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

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

The Fits and Starts of Indian Rice Domestication: How the Movement of Rice Across Northwest India Impacted Domestication Pathways and Agricultural Stories

Asia, South: Neolithic

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