Cristina Cobo Castillo

• PhD Archaeology
• Research Fellow in Archaeobotany at University College London

Interactions with China and India played an important part in the development of the Angkorian Khmer Empire. Recent discovery of several Chinese coins at the regional centre of Preah Khan of Kompong Svay provides an opportunity to see how these objects were used in Angkor’s moneyless economy. The broader distribution and function of Chinese coins i...

Myanmar is located within an important geographic corridor of prehistoric demographic and technological exchange, yet relatively few archaeological sites have been securely dated. Here, the authors present a new radiocarbon chronology for Halin, a UNESCO-listed complex in the north-central Sagaing Division of Myanmar, which contributes to the gener...

Archaeological excavations at the site of Đầu Rằm in northern Việt Nam provided new insights into the chronology of Tràng Kênh settlement sites that emerged in the Red River delta during first half of the 2nd millennium BCE. The investigations produced evidence for the production of nephrite/jade rings. This study confirms that Đầu Rằm was a settle...

The Angkor empire (9-15th centuries CE) was one of mainland Southeast Asia's major civilizations, with a 3000 km² agro-urban capital located in northwest Cambodia. Since 2010, the Greater Angkor Project has been investigating occupation areas within Angkor's urban core. This work has identified temple enclosures as important residential areas that...

Maritime trade routes in Southeast Asia date to at least the last millennium BC evidenced by excavations of port‐cities, entrepôts and early coastal polities in Peninsular Thailand, the Mekong Delta and Island Southeast Asia. This trade network intensified over the next millennium and by the fifteenth century, the number of trade goods throughout M...

Asian rice (Oryza sativa L.) is consumed by more than half of the world's population. Despite its global importance, the process of early rice domestication remains unclear. During domestication, wild rice (Oryza rufipogon Griff.) acquired non-seed-shattering behavior, allowing humans to increase grain yield. Previous studies argued that a reductio...

The long period spanning the Neolithic to the Metal Age is still poorly understood in the Thai-Malay peninsula (TMP), and current interpretations rely on limited data from a large region and a few dates obtained mainly from inland cave sites. There has yet to be any published research on estuarine and coastal contexts for this period. In 2017 The F...

Rice is the most important cereal in Southeast Asia today. Archaeobotanical evidence in mainland Southeast Asia suggests that this has been the case over the past three and a half millennia. Archaeologists have tended to emphasize the central role of rice in the origins and dispersal of agriculture, as well as how irrigated rice formed the foundati...

Southeast Asia is one of the most significant regions in the world for tracing human prehistory over a period of 2 million years. Migrations from the African homeland saw settlement by Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis. Anatomically Modern Humans reached Southeast Asia at least 60,000 years ago to establish a hunter-gatherer tradition, adapting as...

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Rice ( Oryza sativa L.) is consumed by more than half of the world’s population, but despite its global importance the mechanisms of domestication remain unclear. During domestication, wild rice ( O. rufipogon Griff.) was transformed by acquiring non-seed-shattering behaviour, an important genetic change that allowed humans to increase grain yield....

Significance This is an exploration of social change, measured by means of the Gini coefficient, that has been applied to a 2,500-y cultural sequence in Southeast Asia. The results indicate pulses of elevated social inequality from different stimuli, some transient but the last, due to an agricultural revolution consequent to climate change, enduri...

Established chronologies indicate a long-term ‘Hoabinhian’ hunter-gatherer occupation of Mainland Southeast Asia during the Terminal Pleistocene to Mid-Holocene (45 000–3000 years ago). Here, the authors re-examine the ‘Hoabinhian’ sequence from north-west Thailand using new radiocarbon and luminescence data from Spirit Cave, Steep Cliff Cave and B...

The dispersal of rice (Oryza sativa) following domestication influenced massive social and cultural changes across South, East, and Southeast Asia. The history of dispersal across islands of Southeast Asia, and the role of Taiwan and the Austronesian expansion in this process remain largely unresolved. Here, we reconstructed the routes of dispersal...

The Angkorian Empire was at its peak from the 10th to 13th centuries CE. It wielded great influence across mainland Southeast Asia and is now one of the most archaeologically visible polities due to its expansive religious building works. This paper presents archaeobotanical evidence from two of the most renowned Angkorian temples largely associate...

Domestication is the process in which preferred genetic changes in wild plants and animals have been selected by humans. In other words, domesticated plants have become adapted to being part of human-managed ecosystems. Asian cultivated rice, Oryza sativa L., is one of the most important crops in the world and is known to have been domesticated fro...

Rice (Oryza sativa) is one of the world’s most important food crops, and is comprised largely of japonica and indica subspecies. Here, we reconstruct the history of rice dispersal in Asia using whole-genome sequences of more than 1,400 landraces, coupled with geographic, environmental, archaeobotanical and paleoclimate data. Originating around 9,00...

The present paper reports the first systematic archaeobotanical evidence from Bangladesh together with direct AMS radiocarbon dates on crop remains. Macro-botanical remains were collected by flotation from two sites, Wari-Bateshwar (WB), an Early Historic archaeological site, dating mainly between 400 and 100 BC, with a later seventh century AD tem...

Background: Vegetatively propagated crops are globally significant in terms of current agricultural production, as well as for understanding the long-term history of early agriculture and plant domestication. Today, significant field crops include sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum), potato (Solanum tuberosum), manioc (Manihot esculenta), bananas an...

Background Vegetatively propagated crops are globally significant in terms of current agricultural production, as well as for understanding the long-term history of early agriculture and plant domestication. Today, significant field crops include sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum), potato (Solanum tuberosum), manioc (Manihot esculenta), bananas and...

Iron-production sites of the early historic period in Mainland Southeast Asia (fifth to fifteenth centuries AD) are rare. Recent excavations at the Tonle Bak site in central Cambodia now provide the first evidence for furnace technology, metallurgical characteristics of slag concentrations and evidence for the organisation of local smelting communi...

Most charring experiments are carried out in the muffle furnace in highly controlled conditions and tackle the taphonomic issues of seed shrinkage and distortion caused by carbonisation. This paper presents the results from charring experiments conducted using real fire conditions. The objective of this study is to reproduce the charring processes...

Forging empire: Angkorian iron smelting, community and ritual practice at Tonle Bak - Volume 93 Issue 372 - Mitch Hendrickson, Stéphanie Leroy, Cristina Castillo, Quan Hua, Enrique Vega, Kaseka Phon

Archaeological research in Bangladesh is a relatively new discipline with archaeological excavations beginning in the late 20th century. The first Archaeology Department in Bangladesh was established at Jahangirnagar University in 1992. As in other tropical areas, palaeo-environmental research has been slow to be adopted and investigated in Banglad...

Key message A novel locus, qCSS3, involved in the non-seed-shattering behaviour of Japonica rice cultivar, ‘Nipponbare’, was detected by QTL-seq analysis using the segregating population with the fixed known seed-shattering loci. Abstract Asian cultivated rice, Oryzasativa, was domesticated from its wild ancestor, O.rufipogon. Loss of seed shatter...

Rice ( Oryza sativa ) is one of the world’s most important food crops. We reconstruct the history of rice dispersal in Asia using whole-genome sequences of >1,400 landraces, coupled with geographic, environmental, archaeobotanical and paleoclimate data. We also identify extrinsic factors that impact genome diversity, with temperature a leading abio...

Cajanus cajan (L.) Millsp. commonly known as pigeonpea, red gram or gungo pea is an important grain legume crop, particularly in rain-fed agricultural regions in the semi-arid tropics, including Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. This paper provides a baseline for the study of the domestication and early history of C. cajan, through reviewing its mode...

Rice is the staple food in Asia and has been documented in archaeological sites from as early as 1,500 BC in Mainland Southeast Asia. In the past ten years, our understanding of the origins, development and spread of rice agriculture into Southeast Asia has gotten better. This is mainly due to more archaeobotanical work being conducted across Mainl...

This article presents the results of the first excavations at Maliwan and Maliwan, the earliest port-settlements from southern Myanmar in the Isthmus of Kra, showing their involvement in extensive networks as far as the West and China during the last centuries BC.

New evidence from archaeological investigations in north-east Thailand shows a transition in rice farming towards wetland cultivation that would have facilitated greater yields and surpluses. This evidence, combined with new dates and palaeoclimatic data, suggests that this transition took place in the Iron Age, at a time of increasingly arid clima...

We model the prehistoric dispersals of two rice varieties, japonica and proto-indica, across Asia using empirical evidence drawn from an archaeobotanical dataset of 400 sites from mainland East, Southeast and South Asia. The approach is based on regression modelling wherein goodness of fit is obtained from log–log quantile regressions of the archae...

Large, 'complex' pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherer communities thrived in southern China and northern Vietnam, contemporaneous with the expansion of farming. Research at Con Co Ngua in Vietnam suggests that such huntergatherer populations shared characteristics with early farming communities: high disease loads, pottery, complex mortuary practices and...

This is the first time an archaeobotanical analysis based on macroremains, both charred and desiccated, from Cambodia is reported. The archaeobotanical samples are rich and provide evidence of rice processing, consumption of non-indigenous pulses, and the use of economic crops. The evidence is supported by data from inscriptions, texts and historic...

The book brings together 16 contributions on the ancient and recent history of citrus fruits. Although they represent the main fruit production on a worldwide scale, very little is known about their original domestication and routes of introduction into the Mediterranean and temperate Europe: few organic remains identified as citrus have been found...

Loc Giang is an early Neolithic settlement located on the east bank of the Vam Co Dong River in Long An Province, southern Vietnam. Archaeological excavations at the site have identified sequences of midden deposit, floor surfaces, postholes and hearths, suggesting that the settlement consisted of ground-built dwellings. Throughout the life of the...

This paper presents archaeobotanical research and analysis from Prehistoric Mainland Southeast Asia in order to understand the development of cereal agriculture in the region. It draws where possible on other disciplines to confirm and strengthen hypotheses. There is enough complementary evidence from archaeobotanical, genetic, morphometric and car...

Rach Nui is a late Neolithic settlement of hunter-gatherers in southern Vietnam. However, the site also has a series of mortared floors corresponding to a sedentary lifestyle, where the inhabitants continued to live in the same area and repaired or replaced their floors over a period of 150 years. The inhabitants relied on a mixed economy that incl...

Loc Giang is an early Neolithic settlement located on the east bank of the Vam Co Dong River in Long An Province, southern Vietnam. Archaeological excavations at the site have identified sequences of midden deposit, floor surfaces, postholes and hearths, suggesting that the settlement consisted of ground-built dwellings. Throughout the life of the...

Loc Giang is an early Neolithic settlement located on the east bank of the Vam Co Dong River in Long An Province, southern Vietnam. Archaeological excavations at the site have identified sequences of midden deposit, floor surfaces, postholes and hearths, suggesting that the settlement consisted of ground-built dwellings. Throughout the life of the...

The archaeology of rice has made important methodological advances over the past decade that have contributed new data on the domestication process, spread and ecology of cultivation. Growing evidence from spikelet bases indicates that non-shattering, domesticated forms evolved gradually in the Yangtze basin and that there were at least two distinc...

Plant macrofossils from the sites of Khao Sam Kaeo and Phu Khao Thong on the Thai-Malay Peninsula show evidence of cross-cultural interactions, particularly between India to the west and Southeast Asia to the east. Archaeobotanical analysis of various cereals, beans and other crops from these assemblages sheds light on the spread and adoption of th...

The history of human settlement in Southeast Asia has been complex and involved several distinct dispersal events. Here, we report the analyses of 1825 individuals from Southeast Asia including new genome-wide genotype data for 146 individuals from three Mainland Southeast Asian (Burmese, Malay and Vietnamese) and four Island Southeast Asian (Dusun...

Rice (Oryza) is one of the world’s most important and productive staple foods, with highly diverse uses and varieties. We use archaeobotany, culture, history, and ethnobotany to trace the history of the development of sticky (or glutinous) forms. True sticky rice is the result of a genetic mutation that causes a loss of amylose starch but higher am...

The banana (Musa) is one of the world’s most important crops and the most valuable fruit in the global market. In the search for varieties that are more pest- and disease-resistant plant breeders are increasingly looking to the wild progenitors,—as understanding its evolution is key to genetic improvement. The banana was also an important economic...

We have compiled an extensive database of archaeological evidence for rice across Asia, including 400 sites from mainland East Asia, Southeast Asia and South Asia. This dataset is used to compare several models for the geographical origins of rice cultivation and infer the most likely region(s) for its origins and subsequent outward diffusion. The...

We report successful extraction and sequencing of ancient DNA from carbonised rice grains (Oryza sativa) from six archaeological sites, including two from India and four from Thailand, ranging in age from ca. 2500 to 1500 BP. In total, 221 archaeological grains were processed by PCR amplification and primary-targeted fragments were sequenced for co...

Studies of trade routes across Southeast Asia in prehistory have hitherto focused largely on archaeological evidence from Mainland Southeast Asia, particularly the Thai Peninsula and Vietnam. The role of Indonesia and Island Southeast Asia in these networks has been poorly understood, owing to the paucity of evidence from this region. Recent resear...

We examine the southern Vietnamese site of Rach Nui, dated to between 3390 and 3850 cal BP, in the context of threemajor aspects of the Neolithic in Mainland Southeast Asia: mound formation and chronology, construction techniques, and subsistence economy. Results indicate that this ca. 75 m in diameter, 5 m high mound, comprising over a dozen phase...

In this paper we will sketch the emerging picture of a dynamic prehistoric Indian Ocean, in which links were created between societies in East Africa, Arabia, South Asia and Southeast Asia, all prior to the better documented trade of later periods, such as the spice trade of the Roman era (Miller, 1969; Cappers, 2006; Boivin et al., 2009: 268-269)....

Non Ban Jak is a large, moated site located in the upper Mun Valley, Northeast Thailand. Excavations over three seasons in 2011-4 have revealed a sequence of occupation that covers the final stage of the local Iron Age. The site is enclosed by two broad moats and banks, and comprises an eastern and a western mound separated by a lower intervening a...

The Thai-Malay Peninsula lies at the heart of Southeast Asia. Geographically, the narrowest point is forty kilometres and forms a barrier against straightforward navigation from the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea and vice versa. This would have either led vessels to cabotage the southernmost part of the peninsula or portage across the peninsul...

There are few archaeological projects incorporating archaeobotanical sampling and even fewer published archaeobotanical studies in Thailand. Available data show that rice was the ubiquitous cereal in prehistory and particularly during the Metal/Iron Age. This either signifies the importance of rice as a crop or signals a preservation bias; both top...

We review the origins and dispersal of rice in Asia based on a data base of 443 archaeobotanical reports. Evidence is considered in terms of quality, and especially whether there are data indicating the mode of cultivation, in flooded (‘paddy’ or ‘wet’) or non-flooded (‘dry’) fields. At present it appears that early rice cultivation in the Yangtze...

Intensive surface surveys are a well-established method in the landscape archaeology of many parts of the world, but have remained relatively rare in Southeast Asian research. This article summarizes the contribution of existing surveys in the latter region and offers results from a short but informative survey of a metal-producing landscape in cen...

Major leaps forward in understanding rice both in genetics and archaeology have taken place in the past decade or so—with the publication of full draft genomes for indica and japonica rice, on the one hand, and with the spread of systematic flotation and increased recovery of archaeological spikelet bases and other rice remains on early sites in Ch...