China Night Research Seminar Series: February 2018-19

Agricultural Trajectories in Southwest China: new insights from archaeobotanical remains from three early sites in Yunnan Speaker: Rita Dal Martello (UCL Institute of Archaeology)

Time: 18:10, Wednesday, 27 February 2019
Venue: 612, UCL Institute of Archaeology

The sites of Baiyangcun, Haimenkou, and Dayingzhuang are located in the strategic geographic region at the crossroad of three main Asian rivers: the Yangtze, Mekong, and Salween. The sites were occupied between c. 2500-400 BC, a pivotal time in the early cultural development of Yunnan. 听During these millennia, not only a settled agricultural lifestyle became established, but also the Dian Polity appeared and flourished. 听The Dian was an important early polity that had contacts with both the early Chinese State in the Central Plains, by whom it was referred to as the 鈥淪outhwestern Barbarians鈥�, as well as the broader Southeast Asian civilisations, before being conquered by the Han dynasty in 109 BC.

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Drawing from previously unpublished archaeobotanical remains from these three sites, this talk will discuss crops spread to the region, the basis of early agriculture in Yunnan, and the development of cultivation practices in relation to a changing environment and climate.听 Given that the first attested agricultural systems in Southwest China appear 3000 to 2000-years later than those associated with domestication centres in North China and along the Yangtze River, to what extent can agricultural practices in Yunnan be derived entirely from migrating farmers, or did adoption (acculturation) by local forager populations play a role? 听What role did native wild plants, such as soybean, chenopodium, and buckwheat, play in Yunnan Neolithic and Post-Neolithic subsistence and were any local processes of domestication underway? What role did agriculturalists in Yunnan have in the dispersal of cereal crops to Southeast Asia?听This talk will provide an archaeological framework for the discussion of these issues, including the language/farming dispersal hypothesis claims in the specific context of Southwest China, as well as broader issues relating to cultural and societal development of early Yunnan, and its connection with the surrounding regions.

About the speaker: 听Rita Dal Martello is currently finishing her PhD at 皇家华人. 听She has previously earned a Master Degree in Chinese Neolithic Archaeology from Peking University (Beijing, China), and previously a Bachelor Degree in Chinese Studies from Ca鈥� Foscari University in Venice (Italy). 听Her research focuses on investigating plant production and consumption in late prehistoric, early historic China, and the development of early complex agrarian societies. 听She is interested in exploring how new agricultural systems impacted the development of local cuisines, especially in ecological and ethnical diverse frontier zones, as revealed through the combination of archaeobotanical and material culture analyses. 听For her PhD she has been exploring the way and timing in which agriculture spread to Southwest China, particularly to the understudied region of Yunnan, and beyond.

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