Abstract
The Lower Yangtze River Valley is a key region for the early development of rice farming and the emergence of wet rice paddy field systems. Subsistence evidence from Neolithic sites in this area highlights the importance of freshwater wetlands for both plant and animal food resources. Early Neolithic rice cultivators looked inland, especially to wetlands and nearby woodlands, for their main protein sources. Links to the sea among these Neolithic populations are notably scarce. Due to the high yields of wet rice, compared with other staple crops as well as dryland rice, the wetland rice focused subsistence strategy of the Lower Yangtze would have supported high, and increasing, local population densities. Paddy agriculture demands labor input and water management on a large scale, which would have stimulated and reinforced trends towards more complex societies, such as that represented by Liangzhu in the lower Yangtze region. Population growth could have been largely absorbed locally, suggesting that population packing, not migration, was the dominant trend. Other case studies of agricultural dispersal, for the Korean Peninsula and Japan further illustrate the lack of correlation between the spread of rice agriculture and wet rice cultivation. Although wet rice cultivation was a pull factor that drew local populations towards increased density and increased social complexity, it did not apparently push groups to migrate outwards. Instead, the transition from wetland to rain fed rice cultivation systems and/or the integration of rice with rain fed millet crops are much more likely to have driven the demographic dynamics that underpin early farmer migrations and crop dispersal.
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Acknowledgements
Research that contributed to this paper and research on early rice across parts of Asia over the last decade has been supported by two research grants to Ling Qin, from the National Social Science Foundation of China (Project number: 13BKG006) on “Archaeological investigation of Yunnan prehistoric agriculture” and from the National Education Ministry of China (Project number: 16JJD780004) on “Technology and civilization: the foundation of early Chinese civilizations”; and three research grants from the Natural Environment Research Council (U.K.), to DQ Fuller, most recently NE/N010957/1 on “The impact of intensification and deintensification of Asian rice production: transitions between wet and dry ecologies.”
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Qin, L., Fuller, D.Q. (2019). Why Rice Farmers Don’t Sail: Coastal Subsistence Traditions and Maritime Trends in Early China. In: Wu, C., Rolett, B. (eds) Prehistoric Maritime Cultures and Seafaring in East Asia. The Archaeology of Asia-Pacific Navigation, vol 1. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9256-7_9
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Print ISBN: 978-981-32-9255-0
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eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)