Between domestication and civilization: the role of agriculture and arboriculture in the emergence of the first urban societies

Abstract

The transition to urbanism has long focused on annual staple crops (cereals and legumes), perhaps at the expense of understanding other changes within agricultural practices that occurred between the end of the initial domestication period and urbanisation. This paper examines the domestication and role of fruit tree crops within urbanisation in both Western Asia and China, using a combination of evidence for morphological change and a database that documents both the earliest occurrence of tree fruit crops and their spread beyond their wild range. In Western Asia the domestication of perennial fruit crops likely occurs between 6500 bc and 3500 bc, although it accompanies a shift in location from that of the earliest domestications within the Fertile Crescent to Mesopotamia, where the earliest urban societies arose. For China, fruit-tree domestication dates between ca 4000 and 2500 bc, commencing after millet domestication and rice domestication in Northern and Southern China, respectively, but within the period that led up to the urban societies that characterised the Longshan period in the Yellow River basin and the Liangzhu Culture in the Lower Yangtze. These results place the domestication of major fruit trees between the end of the domestication of staple annual crops and the rise of urbanism. On this basis it is argued that arboriculture played a fundamental role within the re-organisation of existing land use, shifting the emphasis from short-term returns of cereal crops into longer term investment in the developing agricultural landscape in both Western and East Asia. In this respect perennial tree crops can be placed alongside craft specialisation, such as metallurgy and textiles, in the formation of urban centres and the shaping the organisational administration that accompanied the rise of urbanism.

Assessing the occurrence and status of wheat in late Neolithic central China: the importance of direct AMS radiocarbon dates from Xiazhai

“…A thorough review of all the archaeobotanical data also clearly illustrates a farming system in the Longshan period in central China which was mainly based on S. italica as the staple grain, together with a small amount of P. miliaceum, Oryza and Glycine cultivation (Deng and Qin 2017;Stevens and Fuller 2017). Additional crop diversity may have come from oilseeds or herbs like Cannabis sativa, Perilla frutescens and Brassica juncea, as well as some possible fruit trees, such as Ziziphus jujuba, Armeniaca vulgaris, Prunus persica and Morus alba (Fuller and Stevens 2019). This cropping system can be traced back to the Yangshao period, and the same range of crops was quite common at late Neolithic sites in other regions (Lee et al 2007;d'Alpoim Guedes 2011;Deng 2013;Jin 2013;Liu 2014;Stevens and Fuller 2017;Deng et al 2018).…”

Forest cover and composition on the Loess Plateau during the Middle to Late-Holocene: Integrating wood charcoal analyses

“…Wild relatives of peaches, including Prunus persica, P. davidinia, P. armeniaca and P. mira are widespread across northern China (Lu and Bartholomew, 2003). All of these species would have been likely targets for early foragers and archaeobotanical evidence suggests that P. armeniaca and P. persica were probably cultivated or heavily collected by people in the lower Yangtze River valley by 4000 cal BP (Fuller and Stevens, 2019; Zheng et al, 2014). We hypothesize that these changes in charcoal assemblage composition were likely to be anthropogenic, as humans chose to harvest certain arboreal taxa as fuel and favored the preservation of economically significant fruit trees.…”

Applied archaeobotany of southwest Asia: a tribute to Naomi F. Miller

“…Her research encourages a consideration of both contextual variation and taphonomic processes, particularly when investigating the complexities of crop processing debris vs dung fuel assemblages. Fuller and Stevens (2019) adopt an even simpler set of analytical tools on a much broader spatial and temporal scale, comparing sites across Eurasia from 10,000 to 1000 bce by the percentage of sites at which wild and domesticated fruit trees appear, a form of ubiquity analysis (sensu Popper 1988), in comparison to the presence of domesticated annual grain crops. From the spatial distribution of well-dated archaeobotanical finds, Stevens and Fuller are able to date the domestication of fruit trees in both north and south China.…”