Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China. E. N. Anderson

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      China’s Early Agriculture

       The Dawn of Domesticated Grain

      In China, at the same time, men and women were domesticating rice and millets, developing the first farming systems, and probably experimenting with other early farming activities. Soon afterward, in the Americas, men and women domesticated maize, potatoes, chiles, llamas…. The list goes on.

      In the early and hopeful days of Chinese communism, Mao Zedong and his henchmen paid some lip service to “the Chinese people” and their “creativity.” However little they may have meant it—Mao’s own real hero was Qin Shi Huang Di, of whom more anon—it did make some people think, for a while. Alas, history and anthropology have returned to their more usual role of remembering only the famous names. Recent history books rehearse the old Imperial litany of hapless monarchs captive to their eunuchs and merciless generals decimating provinces. This is a pity. The ordinary people not only survived, but, year after year, dynasty after dynasty, fed the predatory elites. At best, this activity brought them peace, progress, and some prosperity. More often, it brought them more robbery and violence.

      The great discoveries of history are those made by nameless farmers, craftspeople, cooks, and workers of every sort. Yet, also, from early times, China actually had government-sponsored agricultural experiments, manuals, extension services, and statistics. Unlike the West, it had an ideology favoring agriculture.

      Archaeology, and a strikingly large amount of textual and documentary material, can now give us better images of ordinary life in old China. The present book cannot ignore elites, but I will attempt to move the balance a bit—to bring to consciousness the now silent millions who gave so much.

       Early Farming in China

      Immediately before agriculture, the people of what is now northern China were living on acorns, wild yams, wild grass seeds, and wild beans, as well as game and fish. The plants have been identified from starch grains on grinding stones (Liu 2012). Ropes, nets, and woven fabrics were presumably present; they are documented in nearby Russia from comparably early periods, up to 9,400–8,400 years ago (Kuzmin et al. 2012).

      Agriculture began in two separate locations in China with two quite different crops. This might have been two different domestication events, or two local manifestations of an earlier, single event. Evidence at present points to the former conclusion, but we really do not know. The two locations were in the dry Yellow River drainage of the north and the moist, warm Yangzi drainage of the south (on Neolithic and early urban China, see Liu and Chen 2012; Underhill 2013). In the former, millets were the domesticates. “Millet” is a catchall term for any grain with small seeds—significantly smaller than those of wheat. There are a good half dozen millets in China, not very closely related to each other. Foxtail millet (Setaria italica) was probably domesticated first, being a better grain all round, but panic, or broomcorn, millet (Panicum miliaceum) was almost or quite as early. Both are well adapted to the dry, summer-hot, winter-cold north. Broomcorn millet spread rapidly west across the steppes, reaching Europe by 4000 BCE. In China, it was never adopted far from the dry northern interior. Foxtail did not spread west till much later; preferring more rain and warmth, it moved south instead, becoming important throughout China in later millennia. It eventually became a minor but significant grain in the uplands of Southeast Asia and locally in Central Asia and Europe.

      In north China, agriculture began by 8000 BCE, possibly before 9000 (see, e.g., Crawford and Shen 1998; Higham and Lu 1998; Liu 2004; Liu and Chen 2012). Foxtail millet was domesticated by 8000–7500 BCE (K.-c. Chang 1999: 44–45; Liu 2004; X. Liu et al. 2009; T. Lu 2005; see Sagart et al. 2005, passim; Yan 2002; Zhao 2011). The early center of foxtail millet agriculture is a large area, from the Wei River Valley down the Yellow River and then south into the Huai River drainage.

      Domesticated broomcorn millet may go back to 8500 BCE, but the finds are not securely attested (Zhao 2011). It was domesticated in northern China or Central Asia, somewhere between the Aral Sea and the Tian Shan. Genetic comparison of existing strains seems to pinpoint domestication there, and this seems logical given the early appearance of the grain in both China and Europe (Kimata 2012 and pers. comm.). Along the Yellow River, the Cishan culture may have been growing Panicum miliaceum as early as 8300 BP (around 6500 BCE; Bettinger et al. 2010: 703; Zhao 2011).

      “Panic” is just the Latin root for “millet”—it has nothing to do with the Greek word for extreme fear. (The latter came from the god Pan; he keeps people away from his favorite spots by giving them an irrational terror when they go there.) Millet is a pretty obvious thing to domesticate; in pre-Columbian times, a foxtail millet was briefly domesticated in Mexico, and P. sonorum was independently domesticated on the Lower Colorado River. Interestingly, foxtail millet was replaced by maize in Mexico around 3000–2000 BCE, and then in China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries CE. Also, several related (but different) millets were independently domesticated in Africa and India.

      New data show that agriculture may even have been earlier than that. Starch grains on pots and grinding stones show extensive use, implying cultivation and some dependence, by 9500–9000 BCE at Nanzhuang tou, and 9500–7000 at Donghulin (Xiaoyan Yang et al. 2012). If this evidence means what it seems to mean, agriculture was at least as early in north-central China as in the Near East.

      For this time period and later, Ian Morris, in his “big history,” Why the West Rules … For Now, provides a chart purporting to show that the Near East was always earlier than China is every advance except pottery and “rich grave goods” (Morris 2010: 130; he thinks the reason pottery came earlier in the East was that the Easterners boiled food more). Unfortunately, much of this is at best speculative (including the boiling). Leaving aside some errors, the whole chart depends on the luck of the excavation. Archaeology is far more developed in the Near East. Moreover, China’s archaeology is handicapped by the intensive occupation of the landscape. It is good for the residents that China’s first real city—Zhengzhou—persists today as a flourishing metropolis, far bigger than it was in 1500 BCE, but it certainly does not help archaeologists! The Near East was ahead in many things, but the domestication of plants may not have been one of them.

      Both kinds of millets were widespread and basic to many local cultures by 6000 BCE. The Peiligang culture, in the upper Huai drainage, flourished in 7000–5000 BCE and, along with Cishan, “signals the emergence of food production and ritual complexity in the region” (Liu et al. 2010: 816–17). However, СКАЧАТЬ