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

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СКАЧАТЬ most of the Yangzi area, there was a slow transition from shattering to nonshattering, between about 7000 and 5000 BCE. Domesticated rice was common, widespread, and varied by 5000, or at least not long after that, though some areas lagged behind (e.g., Tianluoshan, Zheng, et al. 2010). Recent finds indicate early paddy fields by 4000 (Zheng et al. 2010).

      Rice needs a good deal of phosphorus. This nutrient is often trapped in tight chemical bonds in the warm and wet areas of the world and is thus unavailable to plants. Some rice varieties get around this problem by growing more roots with more phosphorus-absorptive capacity. A gene for such roots has been discovered by Rico Gamuyao and associates (2012) in an Indian rice variety, Kasalath. This gene could almost literally save the world. Phosphate fertilizers are getting expensive as phosphate rock mines are depleted. The world’s rice baskets—notably south and central China, Southeast Asia, much of India, and the American South—have the least available phosphorus (Kochian 2012), and this rice gene, bred into commercial rices, could help feed countless people.

      Rice agriculture spread southward beginning around 6000–4000 BCE, and a complex mosaic of farmers and foragers emerged in the center and south—to remain there for thousands of years (T. Lu 2011). The south remained rather thinly populated well into Han Dynasty times, and the coastal people were already specialized fishers, seafarers, and traders (Jiao 2013)—a lifestyle reminiscent of southern China’s boat people in historic times. Farming was widespread, but clearly “population pressure” and the spread of intensive agriculture were not driving development; trade and seafaring were (Jiao 2013:609–10). Today, there are still foragers not far away, in northern Thailand and in Luzon; the foraging adjustment is often the best way to make use of mountain forests, where agriculture often remains impractical. So a mosaic of practices is expectable. The far southeast may not have had agriculture until 3000–2000, when it spread via interior and coastal routes (Chi and Hung 2012: 12); the usual mosaic continued.

      Zhao Zhijun (2011) believes a third agricultural center might have existed in the south, based on root crops such as yams and taro. Domesticated rice made a sudden and dramatic appearance there a bit after 4000 BCE. Its rapid adoption implies that the region was agricultural already, and some rice root remains have turned up.

      Similarities in styles of houses, pottery, burials, and other cultural matters prove that the northern and central centers, at least, formed one great network (Cohen 2011; we do not know about the root-growing south). New crops and products flowed freely around that ancient core of East Asian civilization. In The Food of China I postulated river-bottom land as the ideal place for early agriculture, but Liu et al. (2009) make a convincing case for domestication in low foothill and piedmont slope areas, where easily worked soil, good drainage, and safety from floods exist. I would bet on both.

       The Later Neolithic

      The emergent cultures like Peiligang were followed by such cultures as Yangshao, made famous in the 1920s for its exquisitely beautiful, large, colorful pottery vessels. They are very early, dating back to 5000 BCE. Yangshao, with settlements up to 25 ha by its middle phase, was centered on the middle Yellow River valley, but widely distributed, and closely related to similar cultures in the Wei Valley and elsewhere (Peterson and Shelach 2010, 2012). The Yangshao people lived largely on the two types of millet but had some rice—a good deal more of it than earlier northern cultures had. The Yangshao also had vegetables and fruits, many pigs and dogs, and a few other animals. (Yangshao is divided into an early phase, 5000–4000 BCE; a middle, 4000–3500; and a late, 3500–2800. See Zhang Zhongpei 2002.) This was followed by gray-to-black pottery generally designated as the Longshan Horizon, or Tradition, in central north China. It lasted until 1900 BCE, when more urban societies entered the picture.

      The Yangshao site of Jiangzhai, near modern Xi’an, has been particularly well studied (Peterson and Shelach 2012; see photographs in Zhang Zhongpei 2002). In the early phase, a circle of houses surrounded a circular central plaza; the whole was protected by a ditch. The houses were divided into roughly five groups, each with several small houses around a larger one; this may indicate kinship groupings. Storage pits could have held enough millet to support hundreds of people. The site may have had around 400 people at any given time. Many households, however, seem to have had slender resources, possibly requiring support from others, or trading goods unseen in the record. Some of them at least probably specialized in pottery making; many well-made ceramics were found. A few copper objects turned up, some including zinc and thus “brass,” but this is surely accidental—there happened to be some zinc naturally occurring in the copper. Other sites have copper and even bronze, but again as an accident of copper and tin occurring together in the ore (Zhang Zhongpei 2002). Still, the occurrence of copper technology in Yangshao times is impressive.

      A dragon figure and a tiger figure, picked out in mussel shells stuck to the floor of a tomb about 5,600 years old, were discovered in Henan in 1987 (Da 1988; K.-c. Chang 1999: 51; Morris 2010: 126; see excellent photographs in K.-c. Chang 2002b: 130, Zhang Zhongpei 2002: 78). The tomb, broadly Yangshao in culture, is probably that of a shaman or similar officiant. His skeleton is flanked by the animals, the dragon on his right, the tiger on his left. (To this day, the dragon, being yang, goes on the right; the tiger, more yin, on the left.) In the same tomb is a shell design of “an animal with a dragon’s head and a tiger’s body. A deer is seated on the tiger’s back, while on its head is a spider, and in front of it a ball … [and] a man riding on a dragon and a running tiger” (Zhang Zhongpei 2002: 77–78). The same tomb contained a Big Dipper design laid out in bones and other similar art. The dragon, tiger, and deer are still associated with soul travel (such numinous beings are called jue animals; Zhang Zhongpei 2002: 78). Shaman refers to an independent religious practitioner who engages in curing or helping rituals that involve sending his soul to the lands of gods and dead—or sometimes receives souls from there. The word comes from a Tungus language spoken on the borders of Manchuria and is actually first attested in documents from the Tungus-ruled Jin Dynasty in the 1100s CE. True shamans occur in traditional religion throughout East and Central Asia, and the term can be reasonably applied to similar traditional practitioners in indigenous societies of Siberia, native North America, and neighboring areas. The word is not correctly used as a general term for any religious practitioner in a traditional society. In this case, however, it seems highly likely that the man in ancient Henan was indeed a shaman.

      Many complex farming cultures existed in China by 4000 BCE. Dates for first millet cultivation get progressively later as one leaves the interior loess lands in the Yellow River drainage. Similarly, dates for the first rice cultivation get progressively later as one leaves the Yangzi Valley. Reflecting this chronology, rice vocabularies from neighboring but only dubiously related languages show similarities all across East and Southeast Asia (Blench 2005). Japan got rice cultivation only by around 1000 (Kuzmin 2008a); large-scale, intensive cultivation spread, apparently from Korea, after 400.

      Paddy agriculture in China is attested clearly by 2500 BCE (Crawford 2006) and must have been common before then. The rice of West Africa is a different species, independently domesticated about 2,000 years ago (Carney 2001). The “wild rice” of North America is neither wild nor rice; it is an aquatic grass (Zizania aquatica and/or Z. latifolia), cultivated also in China under the name lu sun, a name recently (and confusingly) used for asparagus.

      Decades of failure to find Neolithic soybeans strengthened the case that the soybean came from the north in the Zhou Dynasty—as Chinese records say. Finally, however, Lee and associates (2008) have found earlier domesticated soybeans. A sequence of larger and larger soybeans—indicating deliberate breeding for size—emerged in 3000–2500 BCE in the Erlitou area of central China (where an early “Xia” city rose; see following chapter). Full domestication at around 1100–1000 occurred through north China and Korea (Crawford 2006; Lee 2007). Ping-ti Ho’s classic case for derivation from the Jung barbarians—Shanrong, in today’s usage—may still be fair enough (E. Anderson 1988). Rong, as now transcribed, was a general term for non-Chinese peoples north of the Chinese, and the northeast was the earliest center СКАЧАТЬ