Jennifer Bates

• PhD
• Assistant Professor of Archaeological Science at Seoul National University

In the 12,000 years preceding the Industrial Revolution, human activities led to significant changes in land cover, plant and animal distributions, surface hydrology, and biochemical cycles. Earth system models suggest that this anthropogenic land cover change influenced regional and global climate. However, the representation of past land use in e...

Food lumps are becoming an increasingly important part of the ‘foodways’ turn in archaeobotanical analysis. These amalgams of plant materials allow insights into more than the taxa lists of plants used or even just present on a site; they represent how people engaged with and created food items out of plants, in turn shining a light on notions of f...

Rice is currently the staple food for over 3.5 billion people and is arguably the most important crop exploited by humans. Understanding how we came to the point where a single crop dominates the lives of almost half of the Earth’s population has major significance for our future, even more so given the climatic instability we face today, as rice i...

The way archaeobotanists name and quantify seed fragments is a determinant step not only in the interpretation of a given macrobotanical assemblage, but also in the degree of comparability across different sites. However, seed terminology and quantification have yet not been standardised among scholars but rely on the various geographical and labor...

Climate change is often cited in the ‘collapse’ of complex societies and linked to agricultural resilience or lack thereof. In this article, the authors consider how demand affected agricultural strategies as farmers navigated the transformations of the Late Harappan phase ( c . 1900–1700 BC) of the Indus tradition. Through the modelling of monocro...

While it is clear that current human impact on the earth system is unprecedented in scope and scale, much less is known about the long-term histories of human land use and their effects on vegetation, carbon cycling, and other factors relevant to climate change. Current debates over the possible importance of human activities since the mid second m...

Anthropogenic land cover change (ALCC) models, commonly used for climate modeling, tend to utilize relatively simplistic models of human interaction with the environment. They have historically relied on unsophisticated assumptions about the temporal and spatial variability of the area needed to support one person: per capita land use (PCLU). To he...

Call for papers now closed -- Call for papers for the 20th conference of the International Workgroup for Palaeoethnobotany (IWGP), which will take place in Groningen, the Netherlands in 2025. The prolonged deadline for abstract submission is 24.07.2024. Please see the document and the website https://archaeobotany.org/iwgp2025/ for further informat...

The record of past human adaptations provides crucial lessons for guiding responses to crises in the future1–3. To date, there have been no systematic global comparisons of humans’ ability to absorb and recover from disturbances through time4,5. Here we synthesized resilience across a broad sample of prehistoric population time–frequency data, span...

Dates from recently excavated Gangetic site of Sakas in Bihar, India, place it at ca.1800–1100 BC. The ceramic and lithic chronologies have been interpreted as Early Farming, Transitional and Chalcolithic/Developed Farming in date. However, depending on where in the Ganges Plains is studied, the time frame of Early, Developed and Advanced Farming p...

The record of past human adaptations provides crucial lessons for guiding responses to crises in the future. To date, there have been no systematic global comparisons of humans’ ability to absorb and recover from disturbances through time. We present results of the first attempt to synthesise resilience across a broad sample of prehistoric populati...

The “humility of things”, their physicality and often mundanity, can allow objects to escape our notice in the everyday whilst also making them indispensable to our daily lives. Affordances, the potential relationships that form when people and objects interact, relationships shaped by the physical properties of the objects, further enmesh material...

The South Asian subcontinent contains a vast mosaic of environments and lifeways. Agriculture and pastoralism are important food producing systems within this mosaic but coexist alongside hunter-gatherer-fisher-forager groups, shifting cultivators, and nomadic pastoralists that are often marginalized. This interplay between different lifeways has d...

Human beings are an active component of every terrestrial ecosystem on Earth. Although our local impact on the evolution of these ecosystems has been undeniable and extensively documented, it remains unclear precisely how our activities are altering them, in part because ecosystems are dynamic systems structured by complex, non-linear feedback proc...

The start and end of the urban phase of the Indus civilization (IC; c. 2500 to 1900 BC) are often linked with climate change, specifically regarding trends in the intensity of summer and winter precipitation and its effect on the productivity of local food economies. The Indus Village is a modular agent-based model designed as a heuristic “sandbox”...

Archaeological settlement sites that lie in the vicinity of the modern village of Masudpur, Hissar District, Haryana, were first recorded by D. Singh and C. Singh of the Department of Archaeology and Museums Haryana and subsequently reported by Joshi et al. The precise location of these sites is not known, however. A reconnaissance survey by the La...

Recently, Agnihorti et al. reported on the unique discovery of seven 'organic rich balls' from the Early-Mature Harappan period site of 4MSR (Binjor). Using a combination of microbotanical, geochemical and isotopic analysis they argued that the objects were multi-grained food-balls that had ritual and social functions, with further reaching implica...

Grape (Vitis vinifera L. ssp. vinifera) has been identified as part of the Indus Civilization crop assemblage. As a non-native crop, with a wild ancestor that does not grow in the region, its presence in northern South Asia ca. 3200–1300 bc has thus been used to argue variously as evidence for crop diffusion, long distance trade, and the adoption o...

Domestication is one of the fundamental process that has shaped our world in the last 12,000 years. Changes in the morphology, genetics, and behavior of plants and animals have redefined our interactions with our environments and ourselves. However, while great strides have been made towards understanding the mechanics, timing, and localities of do...

Presentation for the Modelling adaptation of ancient agricultural societies to climate change, the core of an interdisciplinary approach workshop (online), oganised by the RDMed project (26-27 January 2021) 'Resilience and Adaptation to Droughts and Extreme Climate Events in the Mediterranean: Lessons Learnt from Past on a 1.5°Cor more Warmer Worl...

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-2007-2013) (Grant agreement No. 323727).

Indus Civilization economic strategies have traditionally been reconstructed from a land-based focus. However, marine, estuarine and river fishing was, and remains, an important aspect of South Asian food procurement and foodways. While great strides have been taken in understanding the types of fish exploited and the methods used to catch these fi...

The development, floruit and decline of the urban phase of the Indus Civilisation (c.2600/2500-1900 BC) provide an ideal opportunity to investigate social resilience and transformation in relation to a variable climate. The Indus Civilisation extended over most of the Indus River Basin, which includes a mix of diverse environments conditioned, amon...

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The nature of agriculture in the Indus Civilisation of South Asia (c.3200-1300 BCE) remains a topic of intense debate. Traditional models of Indus agriculture have been built on the assumption that it was divided into two cropping seasons: rabi (centred on the winter Western Disturbance) and kharif (focused on exploiting the Indian Summer Monsoon)....

Seshat: Global History Databank, established in 2011, was initiated by an ever-growing team of social scientists and humanities scholars to test theories about the evolution of complex societies (Francois et al. 2016; Turchin et al. 2015). Seshat reflects both what is known about global history (within certain practical constraints, discussed below...

The collection of this dataset of published archaeobotanical data from the Indus Civilisation (c.3200–1500BC) was carried out by the author as part of her doctoral work, and has continued up to October 2017. The dataset represents a systematic collation of all primary published macrobotanical data, regardless of their designation as ‘crop’, ‘fully...

This article introduces the Seshat: Global History Databank, its potential, and its methodology. Seshat is a databank containing vast amounts of quantitative data buttressed by qualitative nuance for a large sample of historical and archaeological polities. The sample is global in scope and covers the period from the Neolithic Revolution to the Ind...

The original version of this article, unfortunately, contained an error. An acknowledgement of funding was incomplete. The acknowledgements have been updated and now read as followed: This research was carried out as a part of J. Bates’s PhD research, which was funded by the Arts and Humanities. The contribution made by C.A. Petrie was supported by...

The exploitation of plant resources was an important part of the economic and social strategies of the people of the Indus Civilisation (c. 3200–1500 BCE). Research has focused mainly on staples such as cereals and pulses, for understanding these strategies with regards to agricultural systems and reconstructions of diet, with some reference to ‘we...

This preliminary report presents an overview of the survey and excavation work at Lohari Ragho I in 2015 and 2017 that was carried out jointly by the Banaras Hindu University and University of Cambridge under the auspices of the TwoRains project. The site of Lohari Ragho I is situated c.9km to the west of Rakhigarhi, and based on surface collection...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0187405.].

Feeding ancient cities in South Asia: dating the adoption of rice, millet and tropical pulses in the Indus civilisation—CORRIGENDUM - Volume 92 Issue 366 - Cameron A. Petrie, Jennifer Bates, Thomas Higham, Ravindra N. Singh

The Paper has Archaeological Site Survey, Mapping and Excavations preliminary results of Lohari Ragho near Rakhigarhi in Hissar District, Haryana.

Several major cereal groups have been identified as staples used by the pre-urban, urban and post-urban phase populations of the Indus Civilisation (3200–1500 BCE): wheat, barley, a range of small hulled millets and also rice, though their proportional exploitation is variable across space and over time. Traditional quantification methods examine t...

There is clear evidence for degrees of uniformity in specific types of material culture that were used across the large area occupied by the populations that comprised the Indus Civilization. There is also evidence that there was considerable cultural diversity across its environmentally varied extent. J. Mark Kenoyer and others have described the...

In this paper Authors describe the preliminary excavation result of the archaeological site Lohari Ragho

Today, farmers in many regions of eastern Asia sow their barley grains in the spring and harvest them in the autumn of the same year (spring barley). However, when it was first domesticated in southwest Asia, barley was grown between the autumn and subsequent spring (winter barley), to complete their life cycles before the summer drought. The quest...

(including Table A and Figs A-C). (DOCX)

Ist issue of the IJSRA (International Journal of Student Research in Archaeology). Includes original research papers, book reviews, conference reviews and interviews. Author list here reflects editorial board and article authors. Contents: Gonzalo Linares Matás - A student perspective on the present of archaeology: IJSRA editorial Gonzalo Linar...

3rd issue of the IJSRA (International Journal of Student Research in Archaeology). Includes original research papers, book reviews, conference reviews and interviews. Author list here reflects editorial board and article authors. Contents: Gonzalo Linares Matás: Presentation of the third issue of IJSRA Interview Cherene de Bruyn, Jacqueline J...

2nd issue of the IJSRA (International Journal of Student Research in Archaeology). Includes original research papers, book and literature reviews, conference reviews and interviews. Author list here reflects editorial board and article authors. Contents: Gonzalo Linares Matás - Presentation of the Second Issue of IJSRA Interview Hannah F. Ryan...

Past human populations are known to have managed crops in a range of ways. Various methods can be used, singly or in conjunction, to reconstruct these strategies, a process which lends itself to the exploration of socio-economic and political themes. This paper endeavours to unpack the concept of ‘multi-cropping’ by considering diversity and variat...

Several major cereal groups have been identified as staples used by the pre-urban, urban and post-urban phase populations of the Indus Civilisation (3200–1500 BCE): wheat, barley, a range of small hulled millets and also rice, though their proportional exploitation is variable across space and over time. Traditional quantification methods examine t...

Past human populations are known to have managed crops in a range of ways. Various methods can be used, singly or in conjunction, to reconstruct these strategies, a process which lends itself to the exploration of socio-economic and political themes. This paper endeavours to unpack the concept of ‘multi-cropping’ by considering diversity and variat...

This paper explores the nature and dynamics of adaptation and resilience in the face of a diverse and varied environmental and ecological context using the case study of South Asia’s Indus Civilization (ca. 3000–1300 BC). Most early complex societies developed in regions where the climatic parameters faced by ancient subsistence farmers were varied...

The nature and timing of rice domestication and the development of rice cultivation in South Asia is much debated. In northern South Asia there is presently a significant gap (c.4200 years) between earliest evidence for the exploitation of wild rice (Lahuradewa c.6000 BCE) and earliest dated evidence for the utilisation of fully domesticated rice (...

This paper explores the nature and dynamics of adaptation and resilience in the face of a diverse and varied environmental and ecological context using the case study of South Asia’s Indus Civilization (ca. 3000–1300 BC). Most early complex societies developed in regions where the climatic parameters faced by ancient subsistence farmers were varied...

This paper presents a preliminary study combining macrobotanical and phytolith analyses to explore crop processing at archaeological sites in Haryana and Rajasthan, northwest India. Current understanding of the agricultural strategies in use by populations associated with South Asia’s Indus Civilisation (3200–1900 bc) has been derived from a small...

This volume contains the final publication of the archaeobotanical remains recovered from four sites at the village of Aşvan in eastern Turkey, which were excavated between 1968 and 1973 as part of the archaeological rescue project in the Keban Dam region. An extensive programme of archaeobotanical research involved detailed study of the modern flo...

Today, farmers in many regions of eastern Asia sow their barley grains in the spring and harvest them in the autumn of the same year (spring barley). However, when it was first domesticated in southwest Asia, barley was grown between the autumn and subsequent spring (winter barley), to complete their life cycles before the summer drought. The quest...

Increase in grain/seed size recurrently features as a key element in the ‘domestication syndrome’ of plants (cf. Zohary and Hopf 2000; Fuller et al. 2014). In the context of its spread across Eurasia, however, the grain size of one of the world's major crop species underwent a substantial reduction. Between the fifth and second millennia BC, the gr...

Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2016.The first direct absolute dates for the exploitation of several summer crops by Indus populations are presented here. These include rice, millets and three tropical pulse species at two settlements in the hinterland of the urban site of Rakhigarhi. The dates confirm the role of native summer domesticates in the rise...

The first direct absolute dates for the exploitation of several summer crops by Indus populations are presented here. These include rice, millets and three tropical pulse species at two settlements in the hinterland of the urban site of Rakhigarhi. The dates confirm the role of native summer domesticates in the rise of Indus cities. They demonstrat...

This paper presents a review of the application of phytolith analysis to the archaeology of the Indus Civilisation (c. 4000-1300 BCE) of South Asia. Phytoliths are microscopic silica casts of plant cells formed during the life of the plant through the uptake of monosilicic acid from groundwater. The phytolith studies that have thus far been carried...

The first direct absolute dates for the exploitation of several summer crops by Indus populations are presented. These include rice, millets and three tropical pulse species at two settlements in the hinterland of the urban site of Rakhigarhi. The dates confirm the role of native summer domesticates in the rise of Indus cities. They demonstrate tha...

Increase in grain/seed size recurrently features as a key element in the ‘domestication syndrome’ of plants (cf. Zohary and Hopf 2000; Fuller et al. 2014). In the context of its spread across Eurasia, however, the grain size of one of the world's major crop species underwent a substantial reduction. Between the fifth and second millennia BC, the gr...

This thesis explores the agricultural choices made by rural populations of the Indus Civilisation (3200-1300BC) and the subsequent Painted Grey Ware period (1300-500BC) by analysing macrobotanical and phytolith remains from five rural settlements in north-west India. The Indus Civilisation has typically been characterised as a society that underwen...

The Indus Civilization (3rd to 2nd millennium BC) has been understood primarily through the study of its cities. However, the majority of the population lived in rural villages whose material remains have not been the focus of archaeological research. There has been no consensus on the nature of the social organization of the Indus Civilization, an...

Phytoliths and macrobotanical samples from Masudpur I and VII, small village sites in the hinterland of the urban city Rakhigarhi, have been analysed to explore the regionality of agricultural practices and relationships between rural sites in the Indus Civilisation (2600-1900BC) of South Asia. By comparing the archaeobotanical assemblages of the M...

Phytoliths from Masudpur VII, a one-hectare village site in the hinterland of the urban site of Rakhigarhi, have been analysed to explore the relationship between developing urban centres and small rural settlements in the Indus Civilisation (2600-1900BC) of South Asia through looking at exchange and crop processing practices. Despite being far mor...