Modeling the Development of Early Rice Agriculture: Ethnoecological Perspectives from Northeast Thailand
Year: 1995
Type: article
Abstract: Asia (e.g., Bellwood et al. 1992; Oka 1988). Although during the past two decades advances have been made in both biological and archaeological lines of inquiry, "the one problem on which no headway has been made in recent years is whether or not long [g]rained rice was taken into cultivation as a wet land or dry land crop " (Maloney 1991: 124). Whether rice was initially developed as a wet or a dry crop has further implications concerning the development of the two major cropping regimes in Southeast Asia (Hutterer 1983: 184), which in turn have implications for patterns of sociocultural development. Inundated rice is generally grown in permanent fields and is associated with settled villages, and upland ("dry " land) rice is usually associated with swidden fields and some degree of settlement mobility. The nature of the environment manipulated by early rice cultivators is one of the key questions in resolving this issue. Although various environments have been suggested, including the humid tropics (Hutterer 1983), coastal tracts of mangrove-estuary (Higham and Maloney 1989: 658), and hilly uplands (e.g., Siam Society 1989: 190), the strongest evidence points to lowland subtropical contexts (Bellwood 1985: 208). At the present stage of research, however, em-pirical data are sparse and open to conflicting interpretations. For even a single region we lack the archaeobotanical, palynological, archaeological, and settle-ment pattern data to reconstruct an early cultivating system comprehensively. And for some questions (e.g., differentiating wet and dry rice macrofossils or pol-len) we lack the methodology. Hence we remain in a speculative, model-build-ing, and testing stage of research. This discussion will develop a model for early rice cultivation as initially focus-ing on seasonally inundated habitats in subtropical zones and propose how both major rice-cropping regimes might have evolved from this common beginning. It is furthermore proposed that slash-and-burn cultivation developed as a parallel cropping strategy to inundated rice cultivation, and that "dry " rice was incorpor-
Author: Joyce C. White
Language: English
Subfield: Archeology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Zero hunger
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2288023223