Early agriculture in South Asia

Kingwell-Banham, Eleanor; Petrie, Cameron A.; Fuller, Dorian Q.

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511978807.011

Cited by 24 publications

(29 citation statements)

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“…The earliest Neolithic sites, on the Indus Valley around Mehrgarh in Baluchistan, date to before 9 ka [85, 86], and the earliest crops in South Asia derived from Southwest Asian founder crops from the Fertile Crescent [19, 87]. Numerous mtDNA lineages entered South Asia in this period from Anatolia, the Caucasus and Iran.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A genetic chronology for the Indian Subcontinent points to heavily sex-biased dispersals

et al. 2017

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BackgroundIndia is a patchwork of tribal and non-tribal populations that speak many different languages from various language families. Indo-European, spoken across northern and central India, and also in Pakistan and Bangladesh, has been frequently connected to the so-called “Indo-Aryan invasions” from Central Asia ~3.5 ka and the establishment of the caste system, but the extent of immigration at this time remains extremely controversial. South India, on the other hand, is dominated by Dravidian languages. India displays a high level of endogamy due to its strict social boundaries, and high genetic drift as a result of long-term isolation which, together with a very complex history, makes the genetic study of Indian populations challenging.ResultsWe have combined a detailed, high-resolution mitogenome analysis with summaries of autosomal data and Y-chromosome lineages to establish a settlement chronology for the Indian Subcontinent. Maternal lineages document the earliest settlement ~55–65 ka (thousand years ago), and major population shifts in the later Pleistocene that explain previous dating discrepancies and neutrality violation. Whilst current genome-wide analyses conflate all dispersals from Southwest and Central Asia, we were able to tease out from the mitogenome data distinct dispersal episodes dating from between the Last Glacial Maximum to the Bronze Age. Moreover, we found an extremely marked sex bias by comparing the different genetic systems.ConclusionsMaternal lineages primarily reflect earlier, pre-Holocene processes, and paternal lineages predominantly episodes within the last 10 ka. In particular, genetic influx from Central Asia in the Bronze Age was strongly male-driven, consistent with the patriarchal, patrilocal and patrilineal social structure attributed to the inferred pastoralist early Indo-European society. This was part of a much wider process of Indo-European expansion, with an ultimate source in the Pontic-Caspian region, which carried closely related Y-chromosome lineages, a smaller fraction of autosomal genome-wide variation and an even smaller fraction of mitogenomes across a vast swathe of Eurasia between 5 and 3.5 ka.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12862-017-0936-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A genetic chronology for the Indian Subcontinent points to heavily sex-biased dispersals

et al. 2017

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“…A key question not yet addressed in archaeological assessments of food change in pre-modern India (Morrison 2016;Kingwell-Banham et al 2015), is the influence of Buddhism on the presumed polarisation between rice and other cereal staples. The likely answer from the Canonical textual perspective is that monks must eat whatever they receive on their begging rounds and thus have little say in dietary matters.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Given the lack of a recorded history of commercial rice-production in the area, our suggestion of largescale rice-cultivation in central India will undergo testing through geoarchaeological and archaeobotanical analyses, together with text-based analysis of the changing cultural and religious significance of irrigated rice versus unirrigated wheat or millet (Shaw et al Forthcoming). The archaeobotany of Indian rice has hitherto focussed on Neolithic origins of domestication in the Gangetic valley (Fuller 2005;Kingwell-Banham et al 2015). For later periods we are dependent on textual references to paddy fields and rice cultivation, either as backdrops to Buddhist narratives or metaphors for Buddhist discipline (Benavides 2005, 80;for 'field' (kṣetra) as metaphor for the human body, and the planting, cultivation and harvest of acts (karma) in Hindu Sāṃkhya philosophy, see Malinar 2016; for a similar analogy between healthy soils and healthy bodies in Ayurvedic medical texts, see Zimmermann 2004, 377-379), which suggest that the landscape in which the 'second urbanisation' and the first Buddhist communities grew up was an overwhelmingly rice-growing one.…”

Section: Reservoirs Rice-production and Monastic Landlordismmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…influencing archaeologically attested changes in land-use, food culture and land-tenure in early-historic India, as illustrated by the changing dynamics between irrigated rice, and non-irrigated wheat (and millet) crops, and the widespread adoption of vegetarianism, especially as urbanism and related phenomena spread westwards from the Gangetic valley. To date, Indian archaeobotany has focussed on Neolithic origins of domestication (Fuller 2005;Kingwell-Banham et al 2015), with less emphasis on later periods, or on how religio-philosophical developments influenced, or responded to changes in food production and consumption; whilst an archaeology of food in specifically Buddhist contexts awaits further study (Coningham 2001, 88).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Religion, ‘nature’ and environmental ethics in ancient India: archaeologies of human:non-human suffering and well-being in early Buddhist and Hindu contexts

Shaw

2016

World Archaeology

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This paper assesses archaeology's contribution to debates regarding the ecological focus of early Buddhism and Hinduism and its relevance to global environmentalism. Evidence for long-term human:non-human entanglement, and the socioeconomically constructed element of 'nature' on which Indic culture supposedly rests, challenges post-colonial tropes of India's utopian, 'eco-friendly' past, whilst also highlighting the potency of individual human:non-human epistemologies for building historically grounded models of Indian environmentalism. For early Buddhism,I mediate between two polarized views: one promoting the idea of 'eco-dharma', as a reflection of Buddhism's alignment with non-violence (ahiṃsā), and the alleviation of suffering (dukkha); a second arguing that early Buddhist traditions have been misappropriated by western environmentalism. I argue that the latter view subscribes to canonical models of passive monks removed from worldly concerns, despite archaeological evidence for socially-engaged monastic landlordism from the late centuries BC. Others cite this evidence only to negate Buddhism's eco-credentials, thereby overlooking the human:non-human entanglement theme within modern environmental discourse, while the predominant focus on non-human suffering overlooks convergences between modern and ancient ecological ethics and environmental health. Case studies include examples of Buddhist land and water management in central India, set within discussions of human v. non-human-centric frameworks of well-being and suffering, purity and pollution, and broader Indic medico-ecological epistemologies, as possible models for collective responses to environmental stress.

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“…They are, however, less studied and thus less well understood. The South Asian subcontinent stands out as a region characterised by a number of distinctive forms of early farming, including the exploitation of winter and summer cereals, pulses and fruits (Fuller 2011;Kingwell-Banham et al 2015), the cultivation of which was enabled (and constrained) by the high level of environmental diversity. The populations of South Asia's Indus Civilisation, who occupied areas of modern Pakistan and India, made use of a range of these crops and managed to occupy, and thrive in, a zone that straddled an important environmental threshold, where winter and summer rainfall systems overlapped ( Fig.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Multi-cropping’, Intercropping and Adaptation to Variable Environments in Indus South Asia

Petrie

Bates

2017

J World Prehist

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Past human populations are known to have managed crops in a range of ways. Various methods can be used, singly or in conjunction, to reconstruct these strategies, a process which lends itself to the exploration of socio-economic and political themes. This paper endeavours to unpack the concept of 'multi-cropping' by considering diversity and variation in the cropping practices of the populations of South Asia's Indus Civilisation. It argues that nuanced interpretations of the evidence provided by the combinations of crop seeds and weeds present in specific contexts and phases of occupation can reveal much about Indus cropping strategies, which in turn enables consideration of issues related to adaptation, intensification and resilience in the face of changing social, political, economic and environmental climates.

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Early agriculture in South Asia

Cited by 24 publications

References 30 publications

A genetic chronology for the Indian Subcontinent points to heavily sex-biased dispersals

A genetic chronology for the Indian Subcontinent points to heavily sex-biased dispersals

Religion, ‘nature’ and environmental ethics in ancient India: archaeologies of human:non-human suffering and well-being in early Buddhist and Hindu contexts

‘Multi-cropping’, Intercropping and Adaptation to Variable Environments in Indus South Asia

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