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

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СКАЧАТЬ people comprised acorns, as shown by abundant acorn starch grains in their well-made grinding stones (Liu 2012; Liu et al. 2010). Acorns are still somewhat widely used in China; in ancient Zhejiang they were made into an acorn jelly (Liu et al. 2010: 830), evidently similar to that which remains a common food in Korea today. In any case, in Peiligang the acorns and wild yams of an earlier age were suddenly and dramatically supplemented (but not replaced!) by great quantities of domesticated millet and rice (Liu 2012). The Peiligang and other early cultures had small settlements, 1–8 ha in size. Agriculture reached Inner Mongolia by around 6000 BCE (Xinglongwa culture; Shelach et al. 2011). Here and elsewhere, tree crops were so important in those days that Li Liu suspects deliberate tree management—resource husbandry—as in ancient California (Liu and Chen 2012: 265–67).

      Around 5500 BCE, people, pigs, and dogs in central north China suddenly shifted toward eating a lot more millet. One way we know is that their bones all show markers of subsistence on plants that use the C₄ pathway of carbon metabolism (Barton et al. 2008; Jing and Campbell 2009). (C₄ is found largely among tropical grasses. Most other plants use the C₃ pathway.) In this area, the only common C₄ plants are millets, so this is evidence for reliance on agriculture. Wild plants and other cultigens in the area are C₃. The only other important C₄ plant in China is maize, which did not reach China until the sixteenth or seventeenth century CE. Jing and Campbell (2009: 101) report a very odd case of two skeletons showing a C₃ diet among the many showing C₄. Were these strangers? Hunter-gatherers from the uplands? Migrants from rice regions to the south?

      At Dadiwan, we have the unique advantage of an almost continuous record of 80,000 years. Dadiwan is in the dry loess plateau lands (around 20” annual rainfall) of the Wei River drainage, northwest of Xi’an, but the climate was wetter during at least some of the Neolithic period. The site shows millet agriculture appearing slowly from 5500 BCE and intensifying between 5000 and 4000 into full Neolithic (Bettinger et al. 2010). Most of the loess plateaus of interior China were grassy or brushy, with sagebrush steppes and wild jujube scrub. These dominated on level lands. On loess soil, rainwater seeps in quickly and deeply, leaving the surface both dry and fire prone. In areas as dry as this, grass takes over. The steeper slopes were brushy, because water ran off too fast to allow much tree growth. (In addition to cited sources, I have my own observations of the loess plateaus to go by, as well as careful scanning of satellite photographs. For magnificent photographs of Chinese Neolithic sites and objects, see Yan 2002; Zhang Zhongpei 2002.)

      However, the vast loess plateau is broken by many valleys and ravines and by higher hills and mountains. These were, and sometimes still are, densely forested. At Dadiwan (which has an archaeological record from 6000 to 1800 BCE) and nearby Xishanping, there is a good record of pollen and charcoal from 3200 to 2200. It reveals that the area had surprisingly diverse and rich forests, dominated by maple, elm, oak, and similar trees (Liu et al. 2013). Hazelnuts, chestnuts, wild cherries, and acorns from the oaks would have provided food. Most of these were probably on the hill and mountain ranges. Spruce and birch were common higher on the ranges, indicating cool moist conditions there. A wetter climate had also allowed warm-temperate plants like bamboo and sweetgum to flourish in the valleys, now totally farmed. Today, any area not too steep to be terraced is now used intensively for agriculture. This area is now cold and dry.

      Rice (Oryza sativa) was domesticated somewhere in or near the Yangzi River drainage. Theories of Southeast Asian or Indian origin and of multiple sites of domestication have now been disproved; recent archaeology and genetic analysis (Molina et al. 2011) suggest that domestication was a single event that occurred in central China around 6000–7000 BCE.

      Rice was cultivated and very possibly domesticated by around 8000 BCE (K.-c. Chang 1999: 46; Jiang and Liu 2006, earliest site, Shangshan in Zhejiang; Liu 2004; T. Lu 2005, 2011; MacNeish and Libby 1995; Yan 2002). Crawford (2006), Zhao (2011), and many others doubt domestication by this early date, finding certainty only by 6500 BCE, but Kuzmin (2008a) has definite evidence for it by 7000 BCE. It is now clear that China, specifically the Yangzi Valley and environs, was the place of origin of domesticated rice and of rice agriculture, though rice was quite early in the Yellow River drainage also (Liu and Chen 2012). A recent paper by Xuehui Huang et al. (2012) maintains that rice was domesticated in the Pearl River drainage, but their collections of wild rice (Oryza rufipogon, the known ancestor of O. sativa) were all from south China; there is so little purely wild rice in the Yangzi Valley that they apparently could not find any to sample. Genetics confirms that rice was first cultivated there and spread from there throughout China, then Korea and Southeast Asia, and finally South Asia and—in historic times—the rest of the world (Molina et al. 2011).

      From earliest times, rice was divided into japonica and indica varieties; these are different enough that they are difficult to cross. They show up as clearly different by 5000 BCE or soon after. Xuehui Huang et al. (2012) found that japonica was the original domesticate and think that indica developed by outcrossing to local varieties in Southeast and, later, South Asia. However, they may very well have been different wild types from different areas, since they are so different that it is hard to imagine them differentiating by 5000 BCE under cultivation; rice cultivation was very new at the time. Again one may suppose that the crossing took place earlier and farther north, somewhere in the Yangzi area. Others think these varieties may have been separate even before domestication. Japonica rices have shorter grains that cook up rather sticky; Japanese rice, derived from Chinese japonicas, is typical. Indica rices have longer grains that cook drier, like most Chinese and Indian rices. Some rices, also, already had the now-common genetic variant of the starch amylose that makes them cook up sticky. (This is mistakenly called glutinous in some sources; “glutinous,” in reference to grain, should be confined to grain that has actual gluten in it. Wheat has it; rice does not.)

      At Jiahu in the Huai Valley, almost in the exact center of today’s China, rice was grown abundantly by 7000–6000 BCE (Zhang Chi and Hung 2013; the village was occupied until 5800). Since this village is apparently not in the natural range of rice, the plant must have been cultivated—unless it did range there in those warmer, wetter times. Jiahu rice still looks rather wild botanically (Cohen 2011) but has some morphological indications of domestication (Zhang Chi and Hung 2013). The inhabitants ate little or no millet (as shown by lack of C₄ indications in their bones). Game and fish, plus wild foods including acorns, water caltrops (Trapa, mistakenly reported as “water chestnuts” in most English-language literature), and wild soybeans, and domestic dogs and pigs filled out the food supply. There are many similar sites in the area.

      From early Neolithic times, the Chinese were known to drink fermented beverage made of rice, honey, and grape and hawthorn fruit, as evidenced by unmistakable lees on pots from 7000–6600 BCE at Jiahu. Patrick McGovern, dean of oeno-archaeologists, has examined and analyzed these (Khamsi 2004; McGovern 2009 and pers. comm.; Zhang Juzhong and Lee 2005). This is as early as any cultivated rice in the world, if the rice was cultivated (it may well not have been). It seems that the Chinese started brewing as soon as they had domesticated grain. The drink itself has been reconstructed by McGovern in collaboration with Dogfish Head Brewery, which sells it under the name of Chateau Jiahu. It is possibly not the finest taste experience in the beer world, and thus is not widely sold, but it is at least sometimes available after almost 9,000 years (McGovern 2009 and pers. comm., plus my personal experience with a goodly amount of it).

      The people of Jiahu made flutes of crane bones; many have been recovered, some still playable (Liu and Chen 2012; Zhang Juzhong and Lee 2005). Cranes are sacred in much of East Asia to this day, and one can assume the flutes were used in shamanistic or other religious rites. These flutes are the earliest known multinote musical instruments, and indicate a complex, sensitive use of biotic resources, as well as probable reverence for cranes, much venerated in historic times.

      Dorian Fuller and collaborators (2009) looked at rice grains to see if they came from easily shattering heads as opposed to nonshattering ones. People domesticating a grain will naturally select for nonshattering heads; the shattering ones fall apart СКАЧАТЬ