The spread of agriculture into Far East Eurasia: Timing, pathways, and environmental feedbacks

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Pavel Tarasov
• Subject Area: Physical Geography
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 433830691

• Final Report Year: 2023

Final Report Abstract

The project provides new insights into the dispersal of crops and agricultural practices to Far Eastern Eurasia and their driving factors. Compared to the centres of agriculture development and state formation in Southwest and East Asia, the shift from foraging to farming in most parts of this region, often regarded as “peripheral”, has long remained understudied. We assembled existing and obtained new directly dated archaeobotanical records of charred plant remains from prehistoric cultural layers in the focus region. Our results from Japan and Taiwan demonstrate that early agriculture was based on a mixed rice-millet cultivation, showing that less labour-intensive dry field farming (millet) played an important role in the food production systems. A complex spatial-temporal pattern of rice/millet preferences can be explained by differences in climatic conditions and the heterogenous admixture of the immigrating farmers with the local hunter-fisher-gatherers. A shift to more productive wet rice cultivation was a long process that affected most of Japan not before the early 1st millennium CE. The new data from Taiwan suggest that agricultural systems were mainly based on ricemillet dry field cultivation throughout prehistory. Compared to Japan, beans appear to have played an important role as supplementary food and/or green manure. While existing data indicated that early agricultural practices in the Primorye region, Russian Far East, were based on millet cultivation, the timing, routes and driving forces of its introduction were unclear. We performed radiocarbon (14C) dating on a representative set of archaeological millet samples and the results showed that millet arrived to the region in the early 3rd millennium BCE and then spread across the area during the following centuries. We concluded that it was introduced to Primorye by immigrants from the Liao River region (China) likely as a result of population pressure from the Lower Yellow River combined with a long-term aridification trend. Our in-depth comparison of available palaeoenvironmental with archaeological records from the Primorye region shows that several phases of climate change and cultural transition, migration and changes in population numbers, and/or subsistence strategies occur synchronous. This includes one of the main prehistoric cultural changes marked by population decrease, decline of farming, and greater focus on hunting, fishing, and gathering that is coeval with a shift towards cooler climatic conditions at the beginning of the 1st millennium CE. Human-environment interactions in Japan before and after the introduction of agriculture in the early 1st millennium BCE are poorly understood due to the lack of well-dated palaeoenvironmental records. To fill this gap, we have retrieved a continuous sediment core from a lake in Central Japan. Obtained 14C dates show that the sediment is a high-resolution archive suitable for reconstructing changes in vegetation and land use over the last 6000 years and thus offers ideal conditions for further research on this topic.

Publications

• Crop cultivation of Middle Yayoi culture communities (fourth century bce–first century ce) in the Kanto region, eastern Japan, inferred from a radiocarbon-dated archaeobotanical record. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany, 30(3), 409-421.
  Leipe, Christian; Endo, Eiko; Kuramochi, Shunsuke; Wagner, Mayke & Tarasov, Pavel E.
  
• Ritual practices and social organisation at the Middle Yayoi culture settlement site of Maenakanishi, eastern Japan. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 12(7).
  Leipe, Christian; Kuramochi, Shunsuke; Wagner, Mayke & Tarasov, Pavel E.
  
• Archaeobotanical evidence of plant cultivation from the Sanbaopi site in south-western Taiwan during the Late Neolithic and Metal Age. The Holocene, 33(2), 131-146.
  Leipe, Christian; Lu, Jou-chun; Chi, Ko-an; Lee, Shu-min; Yang, Hung-cheng & Wagner, Mayke
  
• Environmental evolution and fire history of Rebun Island (Northern Japan) during the past 17,000 years based on biomarkers and pyrogenic compound records from Lake Kushu. Quaternary International, 623, 8-18.
  Yamamoto, Masanobu; Wang, Fangxian; Irino, Tomohisa; Yamada, Kazuyoshi; Haraguchi, Tsuyoshi; Nakamura, Hideto; Gotanda, Katsuya; Yonenobu, Hitoshi; Leipe, Christian; Chen, Xuan-Yu & Tarasov, Pavel E.
  
• Evidence of millet and millet agriculture in the Far East Region of Russia derived from archaeobotanical data and radiocarbon dating. Quaternary International, 623, 50-67.
  Sergusheva, Elena A.; Leipe, Christian; Klyuev, Nikolai A.; Batarshev, Sergey V.; Garkovik, Alla V.; Dorofeeva, Nataliya A.; Kolomiets, Sergey A.; Krutykh, Evgeny B.; Malkov, Sergey S.; Moreva, Olga L.; Sleptsov, Igor Y.; Hosner, Dominic; Wagner, Mayke & Tarasov, Pavel E.
  
• Holocene Environments, Human Subsistence and Adaptation in Northern and Eastern Eurasia. Quaternary International, 623, 1-7.
  Leipe, Christian; Long, Tengwen; Wertmann, Patrick & Wagner, Mayke
  
• Late Pleistocene–Holocene environmental and cultural changes in Primorye, southern Russian Far East: A review. Quaternary International, 623, 68-82.
  Lyashchevskaya, Marina S.; Bazarova, Valentina B.; Dorofeeva, Nataliya A. & Leipe, Christian
  
• Modelling the chronology and dynamics of the spread of Asian rice from ca. 8000 BCE to 1000 CE. Quaternary International, 623, 101-109.
  Long, Tengwen; Chen, Haisu; Leipe, Christian; Wagner, Mayke & Tarasov, Pavel E.
  
• The onset, dispersal and crop preferences of early agriculture in the Japanese archipelago as derived from seed impressions in pottery. Quaternary International, 623, 35-49.
  Endo, Eiko & Leipe, Christian