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Introduction
Jade d’Alpoim Guedes, Ph.D, holds a joint appointment between Anthropology and Scripps Institute of Oceanography at UCSD. She is an environmental archaeologist who studies how humans have adapted their agricultural strategies to changing climatic conditions. Her primary region of focus is China, where she has carried out collaborative fieldwork for the past 10 years. Research interests include archaeobotany, paleoclimate reconstruction and modeling.
Additional affiliations
January 2014 - present
September 2006 - May 2013
Education
September 2013 - December 2013
September 2006 - May 2013
Publications
Publications (91)
By documenting how humans adapted to changes in their environment that are often much greater than those experienced in the instrumental record, archaeology provides our only deep-time laboratory for highlighting the circumstances under which humans managed or failed to find to adaptive solutions to changing climate, not just over a few generations...
This project considered the deposition history of a burned structure located on the Kalispel Tribe of Indians ancestral lands at the Flying Goose site in northeastern Washington. Excavation of the structure revealed stratified deposits that do not conform to established Columbia Plateau architectural types. The small size, location, and absence of...
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...
Since the last systematic review of Tibetan archaeology in 2004 published in Journal of World Prehistory (Aldenderfer and Zhang 2004), a revival of archaeological research on the plateau has begun to reshape our understanding of key issues such as when the plateau was first permanently occupied by humans, and when and how Tibetans first adopted the...
The COVID‐19 pandemic offered humanity a portal through which we could break with the past and imagine our world anew. This article reviews how over the course of 2020, a series of intersecting crises at the nexus of racism, settler colonialism, climate change, and sexual harassment have prompted acts of resistance and care in the field of archaeol...
We examine the Holocene loess record in the Heye Catchment on the margins of the Tibetan Plateau (TP) and China Loess Plateau (CLP) to determine: the region to which the Heye Catchment climate is more similar; temporal change in wind strength; and modification of the loess record by mass wasting and human activity. Luminescence and radiocarbon dati...
Earth ovens, hearths, and middens are common archaeological features in western North America that contain the residues of everyday activities. Ethnographic and archaeological research indicates that these in-ground food preparation features were frequently reused over many months and years. These quotidian features therefore can be productively th...
Quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa Willd.) and millet species (including Eleusine coracana, Panicum miliaceum, and Setaria italica) are nutritionally valuable seed crops with versatile applications in food production and consumption. Both quinoa and millet have the potential to provide drought-tolerant, nutritious complementary crops to maize that is predo...
Archaeologists increasingly use large radiocarbon databases to model prehistoric human demography (also termed paleo-demography). Numerous independent projects, funded over the past decade, have assembled such databases from multiple regions of the world. These data provide unprecedented potential for comparative research on human population ecolog...
Biocultural heritage preservation relies on ethnobotanical knowledge and the paleoethnobotanical data used in (re)constructing histories of human–biota interactions. Biocultural heritage, defined as the knowledge and practices of Indigenous and local peoples and their biological relatives, is often guarded information, meant for specific audiences...
Biocultural heritage preservation relies on ethnobotanical knowledge and the paleoethnobotanical data used in (re)constructing histories of human-biota interactions. Biocultural heritage, defined as the knowledge and practices of Indigenous and Local peoples and their biological relatives, is often guarded information, meant for specific audiences...
The Xindian culture of northwest China has been seen as a prototypical example of a transition toward pastoralism, resulting in part from environmental changes that started around 4000 years ago. To date, there has been little available residential data to document how and whether subsistence strategies and community organization in northwest China...
The COVID-19 pandemic offered humanity a portal via which we could break withthe past and imagine our world anew. This article reviews how over the course of 2020, a seriesof intersecting crises at the nexus of racism, settler colonialism, climate change and sexualharassment have prompted acts of resistance and care in the field of archaeology. Thr...
Yak, a species of bovid uniquely adapted to high-altitude environments, plays a critical role in the life of the inhabitants of the Tibetan Plateau and neighboring areas. There is currently no consensus on when these animals may have been domesticated. In this paper, we review the archaeological, genetic, and linguistic evidence relevant to this qu...
Earth ovens, hearths, and middens are common archaeological features in western North America that contain the residues of everyday activities. Ethnographic and archaeological research indicates these in-ground food preparation features were frequently reused over many months and years. These quotidian features therefore can be productively thought...
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...
Little is known about the prehistoric domestication and cultivation of crops in the Eastern Himalayas (eastern Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh), due to a lack of archaeological and archaeobotanical research in the area. This paper reconstructs the lexical terminology for grains in the East Bodish language sub-family in Eastern Bhutan. Hist...
Paleoethnobotanical assemblages from the Northwestern region of North America often yield geophyte subterranean organs, but these carbonized remains are difficult to identify to species or genus level. We examine 11 species (8 genera) of the most ethnographically prevalent Northwest geophyte foods for macro- and micro-morphologic geophyte features,...
One of the greatest archaeological enigmas is in understanding the role of decision-making, intentionality and interventions in plant life cycles by foraging peoples in transitions to and from low-level food production practices. We bring together archaeological, palaeoclimatological and botanical data to explore relationships over the past 4000 ye...
The transition between the Majiayao (5300–4000 BP) and Qijia (4200–3500 BP) “cultures” in what is now northwestern China’s Gansu Province has typically been defined by major technological changes in pottery forms, subsistence practices, and site locations. These changes are thought to have been driven by a combination of climate change induced cool...
The Asian monsoon and associated river systems supply the water that sustains a large portion of humanity, and has enabled Asia to become home to some of the oldest and most productive farming systems on Earth. This book uses climate data and environmental models to provide a detailed review of variations in the Asian monsoon since the mid-Holocene...
The Asian monsoon and associated river systems supply the water that sustains a large portion of humanity, and has enabled Asia to become home to some of the oldest and most productive farming systems on Earth. This book uses climate data and environmental models to provide a detailed review of variations in the Asian monsoon since the mid-Holocene...
The Asian monsoon and associated river systems supply the water that sustains a large portion of humanity, and has enabled Asia to become home to some of the oldest and most productive farming systems on Earth. This book uses climate data and environmental models to provide a detailed review of variations in the Asian monsoon since the mid-Holocene...
The Asian monsoon and associated river systems supply the water that sustains a large portion of humanity, and has enabled Asia to become home to some of the oldest and most productive farming systems on Earth. This book uses climate data and environmental models to provide a detailed review of variations in the Asian monsoon since the mid-Holocene...
The Asian monsoon and associated river systems supply the water that sustains a large portion of humanity, and has enabled Asia to become home to some of the oldest and most productive farming systems on Earth. This book uses climate data and environmental models to provide a detailed review of variations in the Asian monsoon since the mid-Holocene...
The Asian monsoon and associated river systems supply the water that sustains a large portion of humanity, and has enabled Asia to become home to some of the oldest and most productive farming systems on Earth. This book uses climate data and environmental models to provide a detailed review of variations in the Asian monsoon since the mid-Holocene...
The Asian monsoon and associated river systems supply the water that sustains a large portion of humanity, and has enabled Asia to become home to some of the oldest and most productive farming systems on Earth. This book uses climate data and environmental models to provide a detailed review of variations in the Asian monsoon since the mid-Holocene...
The Asian monsoon and associated river systems supply the water that sustains a large portion of humanity, and has enabled Asia to become home to some of the oldest and most productive farming systems on Earth. This book uses climate data and environmental models to provide a detailed review of variations in the Asian monsoon since the mid-Holocene...
In prehistoric coastal and western-central Thailand, rice was the dominant cultivar. In eastern-central Thailand, however, the first known farmers cultivated millet. Using one of the largest collections of archaeobotanical material in Southeast Asia, this article examines how cropping systems were adapted as domesticates were introduced into easter...
The Khao Wong Prachan Valley of central Thailand is one of four known prehistoric loci of copper mining, smelting and casting in Southeast Asia. Many radiocarbon determinations from bronze-consumption sites in north-east Thailand date the earliest copper-base metallurgy there in the late second millennium BC. By applying kernel density estimation a...
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...
Chinadialogue is a bilingual website, with news, features and reports on environmental issues in China and the rest of the world. Our presentations focuses on the role humans may have had on biodiversity in Jiuzhaigou National Nature Area (northern Sichuan) and some present national policies may reduce that biodiversity.
Archaeological research has documented the migration of Neolithic farmers onto the Tibetan Plateau by 4000 BC. How these incoming groups interacted, if at all, with local indigenous foragers, however, remains unclear. New archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological data from the Zongri site in the north-eastern Tibetan Plateau suggest that local forager...
A synthetic history of human land use
Humans began to leave lasting impacts on Earth's surface starting 10,000 to 8000 years ago. Through a synthetic collaboration with archaeologists around the globe, Stephens et al. compiled a comprehensive picture of the trajectory of human land use worldwide during the Holocene (see the Perspective by Roberts)....
Increasing the productivity and yield of rice in Central Thailand has been a key focus of international and local government policy. Efforts have centered around producing a second winter season of irrigated rice. However, a series of droughts in the region have led to widespread crop failure. We carry out a re-evaluation of weather station and env...
Asking the public to question the assumption that our current systems of governance and food production represent the apex of an evolutionary trajectory is timely and well warranted.
Ancient farmers experienced climate change at the local level through variations in the yields of their staple crops. However, archaeologists have had difficulty in determining where, when, and how changes in climate affected ancient farmers. We model how several key transitions in temperature affected the productivity of six grain crops across Eur...
We describe a preliminary survey of a relatively unknown part of the eastern Himalayas: northwestern Sichuan. This survey revealed that three phases of occupation are represented across the landscape. Large settlements with dense remains characterize the landscape during the Neolithic (3400–2000 cal b.c.). Following a hiatus in occupation, stone-ci...
http://onlinedigeditions.com/publication/?i=440506#{%22issue_id%22:440506,%22page%22:10}
Bocinsky). This paper was submitted 22 V 17 and accepted 22 V 17. We are grateful for the insightful comments provided by Dr. Bellezza on our paper. He raises vital points about the nature of climate and continentality. We agree with Bellezza that the low density of available weather station data from the central and western Tibetan Plateau would r...
Farmer's ability to rapidly grow their populations has been seen as an advantage in allowing them to either engulf or simply do away with foragers. Research on agriculture's spread in East Asia has followed an underlying assumption: that farming produced equally reliable returns across the vast expanse of territories into which it spread. Farmers a...
Proso millet (Panicum miliaceum L.) is a warm season grass with a growing season of 60–100 days. It is a highly nutritious cereal grain used for human consumption, bird seed, and/or ethanol production. Unique characteristics, such as drought and heat tolerance, make proso millet a promising alternative cash crop for the Pacific Northwest (PNW) regi...
The timing and mechanics of the spread of agriculture to the Tibetan Plateau—one of the most challenging environmental contexts on earth—is a focus of recent work and debate. Un- derstanding the timing and spread of agriculture is basic to archaeology and history worldwide. Researchers seek evidence for the earliest, furthest, or highest occurrence...
This paper explores how changes in sea level and biome distribution may have affected the habitats occupied by hunter-gatherers in East Asia. Using a model-based reconstruction of changing sea level from the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) to present day, our analysis reveals that the exposure of a large continental shelf during the LGM sea level lowsta...
Moving crops outside of their original centers of domestication was sometimes a challenging
process. Because of its substantial heat requirements, moving rice agriculture outside
of its homelands of domestication was not an easy process for farmers in the past. Using
crop niche models, we examine the constraints faced by ancient farmers and forager...
These research projects focus on alleviating global hunger and enhancing food security through the interdisciplinary approaches of: Crop and genetic diversity Utilization of novel and sustainable food and farming systems Improved nutritional value and food processing applications Ethnographic anthropology
New data from the Tibetan Plateau allow us to understand how populations dealt with the challenges of moving crops into altitudinally constrained
environments. Despite the interest in explaining the timing and the mechanisms via which agricultural products spread to the roof of the world, current
models for the spread of agriculture to this region...
Chen et al. (Reports, 16 January 2015, p. 248) argued that early Tibetan agriculturalists pushed the limits of farming up to 4000 meters above sea level. We contend that this argument is incompatible with the growing requirements of barley. It is necessary to clearly define past crop niches to create better models for the complex history of the occ...
Code used to create figures and analysis in Jade d’Alpoim Guedes, Jin Guiyun, Kyle Bocinsky (2015) The Impact of Climate on the Spread of Rice Agriculture to North-Eastern China: An Example from Shandong PLOS-One 10(6): e0130430.
Significance
Adapting agricultural systems to the high-altitude environment of the Tibetan Plateau has long been considered a major challenge for farmers. It has been asserted previously that the ecological characteristics of wheat and barley delayed their spread into East Asia. We argue instead that the ability of these crops to tolerate frost and...
Ancient civilization is mostly founded on well-developed agricultural economies, with the Chengdu Plain considered to be the " civilization center " of the upper Yangtze region in China. From result of fl oatation and phytolith analysis on cultural layers and from two pits
Difficulty in accessing high quality reference materials has been a limiting factor in the advancement of archaeobotanical research. However, new developments in online open source content management technology and faster downloading capabilities make high quality and low cost dynamic online curation of archaeobotanical reference images increasingl...
Paleoethnobotany, the study of archaeological plant remains, is poised at the intersection of the study of the past and concerns of the present, including agricultural decision making, biodiversity, and global environmental change, and has much to offer to archaeology, anthropology, and the interdisciplinary study of human relationships with the na...
Understanding how, why and by what mechanisms agricultural practices, technologies and products spread out of their zones of original development is a central theme of archaeology. To date, very few studies have combined agro-ecological modeling with detailed analyses of archaeobotanical remains to outline the kinds of challenges that ancient human...
Moving agriculture into the highlands of the Tibetan plateau, was a challenging process. A crop cultivars phenology determines the ecological niche this species is able to occupy. Short growing seasons, cold winters and spring frost mean that the Tibetan plateau presented considerable challenges to the movement of domesticates into this region. By...
The Tibetan Plateau has one of the least hospitable environments for agriculture on the planet; however, its inhabitants have developed an economic system based on agriculture and pastoralism suited to it’s geoenvironmental stressors. Little is known about the timing of the spread of agriculture onto the plateau or how agricultural systems were ada...