Millets, Rice, Social Complexity, and the Spread of Agriculture to the Chengdu Plain and Southwest China

Abstract

Southwest China played a pivotal role in the spread of agriculture across East and Southeast Asia. Both rice and millet were important in the spread of populations and the expansion of agriculture into this region. Recent finds in the mountainous peripheries of Sichuan Province show that the earliest inhabitants of this region practiced a combination of broomcorn and foxtail millet agriculture (ca 4000-2500 BC). These crops are adapted to high altitude and arid environments, which facilitated their movement across this region and eventually into the Tibetan Plateau. At around 2700 BC, a combined system of rice and foxtail millet agriculture appears suddenly in sites of the Baodun culture on the Chengdu Plain. The use of this double cropping system provided advantages to the inhabitants of this region in both risk reduction and yield. I argue that this had important consequences for spurring population growth, facilitating expansion into new territories and the development of social complexity.

Three thousand years of farming strategies in central Thailand

“…Our analysis confirms that millets were probably the earliest crops introduced to the Khao Wong Prachan Valley, arriving by c. 2300 cal BC (following Weber et al 2010). Foxtail millet cultivation was practised along the margins of the Tibetan Plateau in China as early as c. 3500 BC (d'Alpoim Guedes 2011;d'Alpoim Guedes et al 2016). Millets appear in our samples by c. 2300 cal BC, shortly after appearing on the Chengdu Plain (c. 2700 BC) and in Yunnan Province (c. 2600 cal BC), where they are coupled with finds of rice (d'Alpoim Guedes et al 2013;Jin et al 2014;Dal Martello et al 2018).…”

Pathways to Asian Civilizations: Tracing the Origins and Spread of Rice and Rice Cultures

“…In addition, there appears to have been a separate spread of millet cultivation at higher elevations along the eastern front of the Tibetan plateau, coming down from Gansu (Majiayao culture). Judging by millet finds in western Sichuan and the dates of Changdu Karuo of perhaps 3000 BC (see Guedes 2011), the spread of millets, presumably with some hill-focused lineages of Sino-Tibetan, was earlier than the upriver dispersal of wet rice. Is there any substrate evidence for Hmong-Mien in the Sichuan or Yunnan plains, given their postulated presence in the Middle Yangtze?…”

The Impact of Climate on the Spread of Rice to North-Eastern China: A New Look at the Data from Shandong Province

“…Here, we model the spatial and temporal crop niche of two varieties of rice in the Shandong Province of eastern China over the last 8,000 years. Similar crop niche models have recently been developed for the American Southwest [ 1 ], for Europe [ 2 ] and for Southwest China [ 3 ] and the Tibetan Plateau [ 4 ]. The application of systematic archaeobotany to Shandong Province provides crucial evidence for documenting how this spread took place in a region located at the very limits of the growing niche of rice.…”