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Pathways to Asian Civilizations: Tracing the Origins
and Spread of Rice and Rice Cultures
Dorian Q. Fuller
Received: 29 October 2011 / Accepted: 8 December 2011 / Published online: 4 January 2012
#Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
Abstract Modern genetics, ecology and archaeology are
combined to reconstruct the domestication and diversification
of rice. Early rice cultivation followed two pathways towards
domestication in India and China, with selection for domesti-
cation traits in early Yangtze japonica and a non-domestication
feedback system inferred for ‘proto-indica’. The protracted
domestication process finished around 6,500–6,000 years ago
in China and about two millennia later in India, when hybrid-
ization with Chinese rice took place. Subsequently farming
populations grew and expanded by migration and incorpora-
tion of pre-existing populations. These expansions can be
linked to hypothetical language family dispersal models, in-
cluding dispersal from China southwards by the Sino-Tibetan
and Austronesian groups. In South Asia much dispersal of rice
took place after Indo-Aryan and Dravidian speakers adopted
rice from speakers of lost languages of northern India.
Keywords Domestication .Origins of Agriculture .
Archaeology .Historical Linguistics .Genetics .
Archaeobotany
Introduction
Rice as food and crop is central to the identities of manyAsian
societies, indeed most mainstream state cultures in East,
Southeast and South Asia, from the Japanese to Sichuanese,
to the Thai or Sri Lankan Sinhala see rice as a core part of their
cultural tradition. Rice is central to the civilizations of mon-
soon Asia in two senses. For many Anglo-American archae-
ologists and anthropologists, “civilization”refers to
hierarchical, complex societies of states (e.g. Trigger 2003),
and rice has been part of agricultural production of most of
these from the Ganges to the Mekong to China’s central plains
(although one can argue that millets were more central to the
earliest Chinese (Xia-Shang-Zhou) state(s)). Other anthropol-
ogists, such as those from the French Maussian tradition, use
civilization in the sense of a larger regional shared core of
cultural ideas, within which many states and smaller societies
may be grouped (e.g. Durkheim and Mauss 1913;Swedberg
2010; also, Rowlands 2003). As succinctly summarized by
Weng r o w ( 2010: xviii) civilization “should refer to historical
outcomes of exchanges and borrowings between societies
rather than to processes or attributes that set one society apart
from another.”I would suggest the study of civilization must
pay attention to both the borrowings that link large geograph-
ical and population areas and ways in which those borrowings
are reshaped to be adapted to local cultural styles and differ-
ences within the area. A later historical example is provided
by Buddhism which spread widely through monsoon Asia but
took on very different regional expressions in China, Japan,
Thailand or Sri Lanka. The sharing of rice agriculture is an
earlier example, which shows as much regional variation in
cultivation styles and preferences as it shows similarities.
Rice is clearly central to wider East Asian, Southeast Asian
and South Asian civilization areas in terms of economy and
landscape (Gorou 1984;Bray1994). Indeed some scholars
have pointed to a great and fundamental contrast between
the civilization(s) of rice and Mediterranean bread cultures
(e.g. Watsuji 1961; Hardricourt 1962;Hosoyaetal.2010).
Fuller and Rowlands (2009,2011) highlight the linked
tradition of cooking (boiling and steaming), food textural
preference (sticky, as with glutinous rice), and feasting and
ritual focused on keeping ancestors close. Whichever def-
inition of civilization is preferred, it is clear that the history
of Asian societies, their human populations and the evolu-
tionary history of rice as a crop are inseparable. The
D. Q. Fuller (*)
Institute of Archaeology, University College London,
31-34 Gordon Square,
London WC1H 0PY, UK
e-mail: d.fuller@ucl.ac.uk
Rice (2011) 4:78–92
DOI 10.1007/s12284-011-9078-7
importance of rice agriculture as a motor for demographic
growth, population expansion and origins of sedentary vil-
lage life has been stressed by many archaeologists and
forms a key component in the farming/language dispersal
hypothesis (e.g. Higham 2003;Bellwood1996,1997,
2011;Blust1996; Sagart 2003) This paper assesses our
current state of knowledge about the beginnings of rice
cultivation and the spread of rice inferred from archaeobo-
tanical evidence, its congruence with genetic inferences and
how this might have been linked to major cultural traditions
represented by language families.
The ecologies of rice’s wild relatives: two pathways
to cultivation
Rice can be inferred to have entered cultivation on two
pathways from wild ecology and human use. The wild
progenitors of Asian rice are well-known to include Oryza
rufipogon sensu stricto and Oryza nivara, which are native
to South and Southeast Asia, extending northwards into
Southern China. Modern distribution maps are potentially
misleading for a couple of important reasons: first and
foremost, there has been climatic change such that areas of
suitable tropical and subtropical climate with suitable wet-
land areas will have shifted dramatically over the past
20,000 years. Such environments would have necessarily
peaked in the earlier Holocene when summer insolation in
the northern hemisphere was significantly higher (it fell
gradually from about 7000 BP to present, Berger 1978)
and during the first half of the Holocene (until about 5,000
or 6,000 years ago) monsoon rainfall was much higher (e.g.
Burns 2011; see also, Fuller and Qin 2010). The post-
Pleistocene expansion of wild rice, from southern tropical
refugia of the glacial period northwards to eastern China and
the Yangtze basin (Fig. 1), would have entailed at least one
if not several population bottlenecks in O. rufipogon. An-
other reason modern maps are potentially misleading is that
the potential habitats for wild rice have been removed
through human action over the past few thousand years,
especially through the reclamation of wetlands for agricul-
ture. As a result many wild rice populations have presum-
ably been extirpated. Evidence for this comes from Chinese
texts from the Song dynasty (just over 1,000 years ago,
under essentially modern climatic conditions) which indi-
cate the former presence of wild rice populations in eastern
China in the Lower Yangtze and northwards to Shandong
(Ho 1977;You1987).
Fig. 1 Map of Last Glacial (20,000 BP) refugial wild rice zones (P)
versus Early Holocene (9,000 BP) expansion (H) of wild rice in
comparison to recent populations indicated by crosses and circles (after
Fuller et al. 2010a). Early foci of archaeological evidence relating to
early cultivation are indicated.
Rice (2011) 4:78–92 79
There has long been a case to be made for the separate
origins of domesticated indica and japonica rice subspecies,
from various modern genetic markers, from old-fashioned
crossing to re-sequenced genomes (e.g. Garris et al. 2005;
Londo et al. 2006; Kawakami et al. 2007;Heetal.2011).
Recent versions of this scenario highlight the necessity of
hybridization between a fully domesticated japonica and
semi-domesticated or wild proto-indica (Figs. 2and 3),
whereby japonica became the donor of many domestication
syndrome genes in indica (Sang and Ge 2007; Sweeney and
McCouch 2007;Fulleretal.2010a). It is worth noting that
there are still emerging complications in the story of early
domestication genes, since experiments by Ishikawa et al.
(2010) indicate that plants homozygous for the sh4 non-
shattering mutation still show wild-type shattering in the
context of mainly wild-type genetic background, i.e. there
are other interacting alleles yet to be identified. Because of
incomplete compatibility between japonica and indica rices,
first-generation hybrids would have had low fertility requiring
back-crossing to one or the other parent (Sato 1996); in the
context of India, this is likely to have been the widespread, and
climatically adapted, proto-indica. A model of this process is
provided by the development of Oryza glaberimma ×Oryza
sativa hybrids in West Africa, which has been well described
ethnographically and genetically (Nuijten et al. 2009). There
does persist some debate on this issue, but even those who
favour a single origin (e.g. Vaughan et al. 2008;Molinaetal.
2011a) allow for significant introgression with wild rices
elsewhere (in India and perhaps Southeast Asia).
The differing ecologies of the rufipogon perennial and
nivara annual ecotypes of the wild rice imply differing modes
of hunter-gatherer exploitation and the importance and inten-
sity of early cultivation that was necessary (Fuller and Qin
2009). The perennial rufipogon would have normally been a
fairly poor grain resource, with more metabolic energy
invested in vegetative tissues. This necessitated human manip-
ulation of soil and water environment to induce a drought
response of higher grain productivity. Over time there would
have been selection for more annuality and reduced vegetative
growth (shorter and straighter growth habit), as well as in-
creasing grain yields and grain size. Thus more intensive
human efforts at managing the soil and water conditions of
early cultivated rufipogon would have been repaid by increas-
ing yields and the accumulation of domestication genes. The
archaeological evidence from the Lower Yangtze supports this
inferred process (Fuller and Qin 2009,2010). By contrast, the
annual O. nivara wild rices could have been exploited on a
large scale without any serious cultivation, or selection of
habit changes or domestication traits. This represents a
“proto-indica”hypothesis (Fuller et al. 2010a) in which inten-
sive exploitation of proto-indica wild types, which probably
included burning off competing vegetation and some broad-
cast sowing, could have taken place for millennia without the
evolution of domesticated rice (Fuller 2011). In other words
we would expect the adaptive syndrome of annual wild rice
(Grillo et al. 2009) to have been reinforced through such
proto-cultivation.
How independent was early rice farming in the Ganges?
clarifying northwestern or northeastern inputs
In Gangetic India, archaeological evidence has for a while been
taken to indicate local independent origins of agriculture (e.g.
Fuller 2002,2006a,b,2007;Saraswat2005). Clear evidence
for a local domestication process, however, is still missing.
Fig. 2 Hypothetical
representation of the
phylogenetic history within rice
over time, with hybridizations,
and lost lineages, and diversity
not sampled in modern
germplasm represented.
Modified from a diagram in
Gross and Olsen (2010). X
hybridization event. Potential
lineages of the Neolithic
Ganges, i.e. the ‘proto-indica’
encircled by green dashed line.
Note that lost rice lineages are
meant to be suggestive and
representative, but it is not yet
possible to develop detailed
hypotheses.
80 Rice (2011) 4:78–92
Instead, what archaeology has revealed is quite a lot about the
integrated agricultural systems of the very late Neolithic, a
period in which continuously occupied sedentary villages be-
come the norm. This mostly dates from 2200 or 2000 BC to the
early centuries of the second millennium (Fuller 2006a,2011).
Earlier occupations are likely to have been more mobile, i.e.
this is the problem of “silence before sedentism”which has
limited pinpointing that the actual origins of cultivation in
much of inner India (Fuller 2006b). Increasingly, I think this
makes sense in terms of early agricultural settlements in much
of India being frequently moved due to practices of shifting
cultivation, leaving a poor and ephemeral archaeological re-
cord and precluding much direct archaeobotanical evidence
(Kingwell-Banham and Fuller 2011). Nevertheless the few
early sedentary sites with good evidence, such as Senuwar
(from 2500 BC), suggest that there was a reliance on rice,
probably cultivation, before crops from elsewhere were intro-
duced (Saraswat 2004; discussions in Fuller 2006a,b,2011).
The introduction of domesticates from the west (the
Indus region), may have started as early as 2400–2200
BC, based on a couple of AMS dates, but was well estab-
lished in the Ganges from around 2000 BC. That this was a
gradual process may be indicated by slightly later evidence
at other sites such as Mahagara (from 1800 BC) in which
rice and native millets (but not Setaria pumila,mainly
Brachiaria ramosa) are present in the lowest level with
mungbean (from South India), winter cereals (barley and
wheat) and lentil later in the sequence (Harvey et al. 2006;
Harvey 2006). Preliminary observations on Neolithic plant
remains from the sites of Tokwa and Jhusi suggest a similar
mixed cultivation system was well established before the
end of the Neolithic (Pokharia 2008—but see discussion of
dating problems in Fuller 2011 supplement). All of this may
point towards most of our evidence coming from the end of
the process of agricultural origins in this region, as rice/
wheat/pulse-cultivating sedentary villages with domestic
livestock become widely established. I think it is not an
accident that this really takes off after 2000 BC, when there
is evidence for a “Chinese horizon”of crop introductions
in northwest India and Pakistan (peach, apricot, Panicum
miliaceum,prob.Setaria italica,Cannabis sativa,hand
harvest knives). Of these species Cannabis has names in
India that point linguistically to Central Asian connections
(Witzel 2005). This represents the earliest and best archae-
ological evidence for anything coming out of China and into
South Asia. Of note is that this is just in the centuries after
the first arrival into China of things from the west, such as
taurine cattle, sheep, wheat and barley (see, e.g. Flad et al.
2010; Frachetti et al. 2010). Along with these other plants, I
have hypothesized also the introduction of japonica rice,
and its key nuclear mutations for domestication traits, into
the proto-indica cultivars with a distinct chloroplast genetic
background (see Fuller and Qin 2009; Fuller et al. 2010a).
In linguistic terms, it should be noted that this would clearly
be a process of loans of Chinese crops, and an approach to
harvesting, probably via middlemen and not via immigrants,
i.e. trade rather than demic diffusion (Fig. 4).
Why not an introduction of japonica rice from the north-
east? Proponents of the Austric-farming-dispersal hypothesis
(e.g. Bellwood 1996;Higham2003) have often assumed that
rice farming spread from Yunnan through Assam and into the
Ganges. Others suggest that indica rice came from Southwest
China (i.e. Yunnan), perhaps amongst early Austroasiatic
speakers (Sagart 2008: 138) or perhaps that Northeast India
Fig. 3 Contrasting the
feedback loops of the proto-
indica hypothesis (bottom) and
the japonica domestication
pathway (left). This has been
added to a diagram contrasting
wild versus domesticated crop
processing (Fuller et al. 2010b).
Rice (2011) 4:78–92 81
will eventually prove to be a rice domestication area and/or a
staging post in the spread or rice from China to India (Van
Driem 2011a, b). However, any evidence for this, in terms of
ceramic types, settlement patterns or archaeobotany is lacking.
Admittedly Burma, Assam, Yunnana and Bengal are amongst
the least well-known regions archaeobotanically and archae-
ologically—archaeology is very geographically biased (a
point emphasized by Van Driem). Nevertheless based on
current evidence, which is rapidly improving for Yunnan at
least, the earliest rice farming in the upper Yangtze dates only
from 2500–2000 BC at the earliest. It is of similar date in
Orissa in eastern India and more or less of similar age in the
Ganges. This gives insufficient time for such a spread, and if it
had been quite so rapid one would expect more of an archae-
ological smoking gun, certainly on par with the Longshan-
type harvest knives that were being made and used in Kashmir
and Swat after 2000 BC. As for crops that did come from the
far northeast of India and/or the Yangtze into the Ganges, such
as Citrus trees, cultivated mango and the fibre crop ramie
(Boehmeria nivea), these are all evident in middle Ganges
sites from about 1400 BC onwards (see Saraswat 2004,2005;
Kingwell-Banham and Fuller 2011). This in my opinion indi-
cates the first evidence for agricultural diffusion into the
Indian plains via Assam. I make a distinction here of the
plains, because Munda speakers in all likelihood did migrate
in from the northeast, but with a preference of hill habitats (as
per Fuller 2003;Harveyetal.2006; and contra Fuller 2007;
Donegan and Stampe 2004 hypothesis on Austroastiatic ori-
gins). This is likely to have involved vegeculture (especially
taro), shifting cultivation, and rice, but perhaps more likely
aus rice than japonica.
Can this be accommodated to a single origin of rice?
It is important to be clear on what is meant by “origins”, and
I take the origins of rice to refer to independent traditions of
economic reliance and/or management or cultivation of rice
populations. As should already be clear, I regard the inde-
pendent rice tradition of north India as never having pro-
ceeded on its own to full domestication. However, it is also
possible that local domestication genes were later removed
by drift once mutations with equivalent function were intro-
duced from japonica (Allaby 2010). It should be clarified
that I use domestication in the sense of a set of biological
adaptations (of the plant) to the cultivated environment.
Cultivation is a human activity; domestication is a genetic
change in the plant (following the pedigree of Helbaek
1960; Harlan 1975; Harris 1989; Fuller et al. 2010b). The
modern genetic evidence seems clear that many domestica-
tion traits had a single origin in terms of a single controlling
mutation. These mutations, however, could then have been
introduced into other lineages of managed/cultivated rice, as
outlined above, via hybridization. It should also be clarified
that “domestication event”as used in phylogenetic studies
refers to the sub-sampling process of wild populations (per-
haps with the beginnings of cultivation, but see Allaby 2010),
whereas domestication refers to the fixation of genotypes
adapted to cultivation.
A recent study by Molina et al. (2011a) carried out analysis
of demographic history by attempting to model demographic
parameters from several phylogenetic datasets using the new
generation of collascent models which allow for multiple
branches, bottlenecks and populations. Like the earlier con-
clusions of Vaughan et al. (2008), they conclude that single
domestication of japonica is likely with indica derived from a
subsequent bottleneck. This study, however, does not sway me
from my conclusion about the evidence for a proto-indica
exploited in India before the introduction and hybridization
with improved japonica, but instead it reinforces the need for a
fossil record, namely archaeobotany, to play critic to the
computer-generated art of modelling, and to remind us that
samples from the modern time plane can never capture lost
genetic diversity of extirpated wild and cultivated lines of the
past (Fig. 2). It is less about a failure to account for existing
sub-population structure within modern wild rice (Ge and Sang
2011), since their model has provided some tests for this
(Molina et al. 2011b), but that they are unable to sample and
model the full range of diversity in all the lineages that have
ever beencultivated, however briefly, over the past 8,000 years.
The evidence from rice chloroplast genetics implies as much,
since the chloroplast differs fundamentally between indica and
japonica,nivara and rufipogon, such that there are shared
characters between indica and nivara. Other characters in
indica are unknown in the wild: extinct proto-indica lines are
implied by the chloroplasts (Takahashi et al. 2008). Since
Fig. 4 Maps of the proto-indica hybridization hypothesis in space and
time. The base map shows a geographical interpolation of the spread of
rice (from Fuller et al. 2011b). In green is the focus of an early selection
regime of japonica domestication and its initial dispersal zone, including
northwards into the temperate zone. Blue indicates the potential spread of
proto-indica exploitation and non-intensive cultivation, without major
selection for domestication traits. Most of the spread in South Asia took
place after hybridization.
82 Rice (2011) 4:78–92
chloroplasts are not carried in pollen, pollen from wild Indian
rices introduced to japonica is insufficient explanation. Instead
it seems still easier to posit proto-indica cultivation into which
cultivated japonica, with a suite of valuable domestication
traits, was brought into contact. The genetic background was
largely indica into which japonica was the source of introgres-
sion, i.e. pollen flow. Nevertheless Molina et al. (2011a) rec-
ognize the role of hybridizations in their concluding
discussion, and they are right to highlight the importance of
incomplete lineage sorting in ancestral populations and that
ancestral polymorphisms may have lead to overestimates in
previous molecular clock calculations. Indeed, one of the more
intriguing outcomes of their analysis are the new estimates for
the age of bottlenecks, with an initial domestication placed as
modally 8200 BP, and the indica bottleneck at 3900 BP. The
former fits quite well with current archaeobotanical evidence
for the beginnings of morphological change in Yangtze rice,
i.e. just before the foundation of Kuahuqiao in the Lower
Yangtze or in middle Yangtze terms during the later Pen-
gtoushan culture (cf. Fuller and Qin 2009,2010). The latter
date is spot on for the first appearance of the “Chinese horizon”
in Pakistan and northwest India. This study may be picking up
on the history of the main stream of fully domesticated rice.
Searching for domestication: early cultivators in China
At present there is a surfeit of evidence for changes in the rice
plant that indicate domestication but there is a surplus of
claims and proclamations for the earliest rice, the earliest
agriculture. The excavation teams of pretty much any late
Pleistocene cave or Early Holocene settlement in South China
have laid claim to theirs being the site and area of earliest rice
farming. Archaeobotanical evidence in support of this which
can stand up to scrutiny has been less forthcoming. I do not
here want to repeat critiques of a few years ago (Fuller et al.
2007,2008), which in the context of Hemudu culture have
been vindicated by extensive systematic sampling at Tian-
luoshan (Fuller et al. 2009,2011a), but will summarize the
current state of the evidence. It is now clear that the early
ceramics of 18,000–15,000 years ago are not associated with
early farmers (Zhang and Hung 2008; Boaretto et al. 2009;Lu
2011). Instead it is in the period of 10,000–8,000 years ago
that cultivation began, with fixation of domestication traits
closer to 6,000 years ago (Fuller et al. 2010a).
In recent years there has been an explosion of archae-
obotanical research in China, and methodologically there
have been major improvements such as the collection and
study of spikelet bases (Fuller et al. 2009,2010a). Four
regions have emerged as candidates for early cultivation of
rice (shown in Fig. 1): the Middle Yangtze, the Huai River
and southwest Henan, the Houli culture of Shandong and
the Lower Yangtze. Unfortunately these regions are not
equal in terms of hard evidence, and it remains the case that
only the Lower Yangzte has published morphological and
quantitative evidence for the domestication process as it
happened, and only for the latter half of the process (Fuller
and Qin 2010). Other regions may have been places where
wild rice was collected, where it was under pre-domestication
cultivation, or even where selection for domestication traits
was taking place, but we simply do not know. Some
regions may have been dead ends in relation to the
traditions of rice agriculture and the genetic lines that
persist to this day. This is very likely the case for Shan-
dong where the few finds show no continuity in later
cultures (the Beixin and early Dawenkou are millet fo-
cused, with rice apparently reintroduced during the
Dawenkou period: Song 2011). As for Jiahu, the earliest
site with rice on the Huai river (7000–6000 BC), we still
lack any evidence of spikelet bases, or clear trends of
grain shape evolution, or the development of a weed flora,
or any clear successor sites—was it a dead end of collec-
tors or early cultivators or something more central to later
traditions?—the evidence simply remains unclear. Material
culture traits shared with the Yellow River region on the
one hand and Yangtze Neolithic on the other may have
much to do with this site’s peripheral position to both
cultural worlds, rather than indicating some core source of
all of China’sNeolithicasCohen(2011) seems to imply
(also contra Sagart 2008). Further to the south and west in
Henan, new data from the lowest levels of the site of
Baligang do suggest that non-shattering rice was evolving
and being cultivated here alongside acorn gathering by ca.
6000 BC (unpublished observations),
1
but the excavations
to this level were so limited as to leave material cultural
affinities totally unclear. In the middle Yangtze, archaeobo-
tanical evidence is rather more diverse, from Bashidang and
Chengtoushan, but we once again lack clear domestication
indicators. Cultivation is clear from the weed flora at Cheng-
toushan, ca. 4300–3800 BC (Nasu et al. 2011), and the culti-
vation system does appear to differ from that of later Hemudu
or Majiabang cultures (cf. Fuller and Qin 2009). I tend to
favour a diffuse and multi-centric model in which parallel
processes of early rice cultivation began de novo in more than
one part of China, a position which derives from an emphasis
on archaeological cultural differences between regions which
are more or less contemporary and the lack of clear evidence
for any intensive interaction or trade, but this is not to deny
some underlying cultural affinity along the lines of more
ancient shared Palaeolithic traditions based on cooking pots
and understandings of bodily substance (Fuller and Rowlands
2009,2011). This appears to be similar to the better known
case of the Near East in which early cultivation and the
1
With special thanks to Fan Li (deceased), Zhang Chi and Qin Ling for
hosting me at the excavations and allowing me to look at floats.
Rice (2011) 4:78–92 83
appearance of domesticates appears to be a diffuse process
across a wide region rather than focused on any one core
region (Willcox 2005; Allaby et al. 2010;Fulleretal.2011c,
d). In the Near East, this was built upon a much older shared
tradition of grain-grinding, flour-based foods and roast meats
(Fuller and Rowlands 2009,2011).
Evidence for the end of the domestication process is better,
with both a growing quantity of archaeobotanical evidence
and preserved field systems. Direct evidence for intensive wet
rice agriculture comes from preserved field systems, found at
two sites in the Lower Yangzte at 4200–3800 BC, Chuodun
and Caoxieshan, and one site in the Middle Yangzte at ca.
4500 BC (Chengtoushan, Fuller and Qin 2009;Nasuetal.
2011). Such systems were labour intensive but must have also
supported growing populations: they are likely correlates of
the demographic explosion that would have driven outward
migrations.
The spread of rice and wet rice: demographic
implications and thoughts on language hypotheses
Over the past few years, together with research students,
post-docs and some colleagues from abroad, we have com-
piled a rice database. It is by no means comprehensive in
terms of recording every stray report of archaeological rice,
but it is complete, so far as I am aware, in terms of system-
atically collected and studied archaeobotanical data from
continental Asia (published to date), and where geographi-
cal and chronological gaps are to be found in the evidence,
these regions have been filled with whatever haphazard
evidence for rice there is, from stray hand-collected rice
grains to husk-tempered ceramic sherds. On the basis of this
growing rice database, we published a summary of the
spread of rice in “11 thrusts”(Fuller et al. 2010a). This lead
onto a model of the spread and infilling of the map with wet
rice, which provides an estimate of the potential atmospher-
ic methane that came from flooded rice fields and how that
amount increased over the course of the Holocene (Fuller et
al. 2011b). While this has an important role to play in terms
of assessing the contribution of rice to anthropogenic cli-
mate impacts over the past 5,000 years (see Ruddiman et al.
2011), this model can also be considered to a provide a
partial demographic proxy. Wet rice is more productive
and more labour intensive: it supports as well as requires
higher populations. Below I revisit eight of the “thrusts”of
dispersal together with suggested correlations with past
language spreads. In linguistic terms, I follow my previous
work on South Asia (Fuller 2003,2007) while for East and
Southeast Asia I attempt to chart a middle ground synthesis
from among the thinking by Blench (2005,2008a,2010a,
b), Van Driem (2011a,b) and Sagart (2003,2008,this
volume).
The northern thrust and early temperate japonica
This represents the first northward dispersal of rice from the
Yangtze (and/or Huai) region. This is an important expansion
event in which rice reached north of the Qinling Mountains
quite separated from the wild rices of the Yangtze watershed.
This happened from about 6,000 years ago, and much more
extensively by 5,000 years ago,and judging by grain size (Qin
and Fuller 2009) is likely to have involved evolution of an
early form of short-grained temperate japonica.Thisprobably
implies a genetic bottleneck in rice, secondary to a bottleneck
of initial cultivation and any bottlenecks involved with post-
Pleistocene expansion.
It should be emphasized that this rice was adopted on a
small scale into a well-established regional cultural tradition
(the Early Yangshao), which was mostly dependent on mil-
let cultivation, as well as into the Dawenkou culture of
Shandong (Fig. 5). The beginnings of millet cultivation are
poorly understood, but date back to at least 6000 BC, and
probably have their origin in mobile hunter-gatherers soci-
eties of Early Holocene north China (Bettinger et al. 2010;
Zhao 2011; Cohen 2011), in opposition to the sedentary
collectors who developed rice cultivation. There is little
basis for postulating a single centre for all Chinese millet
origins, but instead there is a scatter of cultures (Dadiwan,
Peilingang, Cishan, Houli, Xinglongwa) which seem to be
settling into more sedentary millet agriculture around 6000–
5500 BC (Liu et al. 2009).
2
Some of these groups may be
dead ends in the sense that more developed sedentary millet
farming replaced earlier traditions during the Yangshao cul-
tural expansion. There no reason to infer that all the early
millet cultural groups were culturally or linguistically uni-
form. Some the early millet cultures probably fit into “mac-
ro-Altaic”(including Tungasic, Koreanic, Blench 2005),
judging by the later spread of millet agriculture to eastern
Siberia (Primorye) and Korea from ca. 3500 BC (Sergusheva
and Vostretsov 2009;Lee2011). The Yangshao phenomenon
was expansive, and this seems likely to have involved, in
some measure, demographic expansion that pushed outwards
and incorporated areas like southern Gansu (formerly Dadi-
wan culture).
Given the continuity from the Yangshao, the Longshan
and hence the Bronze Age, it is hard to imagine the Yang-
shao, millet and pig-focused with added rice, being other
than related to the Sinitic linguistic line. Indeed, Sagart
(2008) has postulated that familiarity with foxtail millet (S.
italica), by far the dominant cereal throughout the Yellow
River region through the Yangshao and Longshan phases
(Song 2011), can be reconstructed for and early Sino-
2
Hard archaeobotanical evidence for tracking the domestication pro-
cess in S. italica or P. miliaceum, or for distinguishing cultivation from
gathering, is so far lacking.
84 Rice (2011) 4:78–92
Tibetan and indeed for his hypothesized STAN, which
would link this to Austronesian. Whether this link really
needs to be a linguistic–genetic one, and not a case of early
interaction and loans, perhaps needs clarification.
Blench (2005) and Blench and Post (2010) suggested it is
difficult to derive all of Sino-Tibetan from shared agricul-
tural origins, and posit hunter-gatherer origins along the
eastern Himalaya. However, ruling out that hunter-gatherers
substrates were not later incorporated into Sino-Tibetan
seems difficult. Therefore in Fig. 5, I have indicated some
early foragers around the eastern front of the Himalayas,
which might have been either pre-agricultural Sino-Tibetan
relatives (as per Blench and Post 2010) or later absorbed by
Sino-Tibetan farmers. Sagart reports shared vocabulary for
rice between (some) Sino-Tibetan (focused on Sinitic) and
Austronesian, but rather than seeing these as deriving from
the domestication of rice by the same group who started
millet cultivation, the archaeology is more in keeping with
an introduction of rice into millet farming.
Archaeobotanical evidence is clearly against the older
notion that millet agriculture developed as rice farmers
moved north (Fuller et al. 2007; Zhao 2011;Song2011).
Instead it makes sense that terms relating to rice are loans to
Sino-Tibetan from early rice-growing Hmong-Mien
[0Miao-Yao] (Van Driem 2011a, b). Indeed Hmong-Mien
is a popular candidate group for rice domesticators, perhaps
those focused on the middle Yangtze (Blench 2005;Van
Driem 2011a). The Yangshao archaeobotanical evidence
suggests a minimal age of 3800–4000 BC (Qin and Fuller
2009) on the introduction of rice from Hmong-Mien to ST
(or STAN), which may therefore help to date some of the
separation of ST or STAN languages.
An earlier Jomon and Chulmun upland japonica?
While the hypothesis that some upland rice reached Korea
and Japan in the Second Millennium BC seems reasonable
(Fuller et al. 2010a; Tanaka et al. 2010), the big demograph-
ic growth presumably came with paddy fields in the first
millennium BC with the Mumun and Yayoi periods. The
spread of paddy fields was defined as “thrust 9”(Fuller et al.
2010a), but is not taken up further here. The linguistic
evidence for an extensive proto-Japonic rice terminology
is clear, but where these terms of the Japanese language
originated is not (see Blench 2005). The recent claim that
the Yayoi elite were immigrants who brought rice from Java
(Kumar 2009) has little merit (Fuller 2010), and there
remains little to support a major migration from the south.
Nevertheless, if Proto-Austronesian precursors were placed
along the Jiangsu/Shandong coastline, as Sagart’s(2008)
hypothesis suggests, then some Austronesian-related termi-
nology should be expected to have made its way into Korea
and Japan, since the source of Korean, and ultimately Jap-
anese, rice is likely Shandong (Ahn 2010). Early pre-Yayoi
rice would have been an upland form, presumably with low
productivity and likely little different from millets. The
Mumun and Yayoi rices, by contrast, were grown in wet
paddy fields, and would have provided higher productivity
and greater demographic increase.
To Taiwan and beyond: a southerly quasi-temperate
japonica
This represents the start of the classic early Austronesian
dispersal hypothesis, in which demographic growth
amongst rice and millet farmers in Taiwan from around
2500 BC fuels onwards migration southward (Bellwood
1996,1997). Rice appears in Taiwan along with foxtail
millet in the early third millennium BC, presumably with
the spread of agriculture from somewhere in mainland Chi-
na (Tsang 2005). Quality archaeobotanical evidence from
Taiwan is still lacking, so that we can say little about the
variation in the rice or how it was cultivated, although
published photographs suggest a shorter grained form,
which would point towards the Yellow River rather than
the Yangtze region as a source zone, as does the millet. The
absence of P. miliaceum so far in Taiwan is curious, as this is
almost always found together with foxtail millet on the
mainland (Song 2011), and has traditional importance
amongst some Formosan-speaking groups in the hills of
Taiwan (Fogg 1983). Together with Dawenkou-Nanguanli
tendencies toward tooth evulsion practices, these thin data
do tally with Sagart’s suggested derivation of the early
Taiwanese crops and AN speakers from Eastern China
around South Shandong or Jiangsu (Fig. 6). Nevertheless,
in terms of archaeological culture, there is clearly close ties
Fig. 5 Some general hypotheses linking the distribution of subsistence
cultures and language affiliation for ca. 4000 BC. The basemap is from
Fuller et al. (2011b) and shows in grey a reconstruction of land area
under wet rice cultivation as a percentage of modern wet rice land area
(the percentage scale is indicated in the shaded bar at the right). It is
presumed that wet rice supported denser and expanding human pop-
ulations. Language family abbreviations: AN Austronesian, Hm-M
Hmong-Mien, STAN Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian (of Sagart 2008).
Rice (2011) 4:78–92 85
between Taiwan and Fujian (Tanshishan culture), but coastal
Fujian archaeology suggests a greater importance of fish and
shell fish instead of agriculture (Rolett et al. 2011), and thus
lacks an agricultural demographic motor. But perhaps we
need to postulate cultural hybridity of some sort with the
traditions of Fujian and coastally focused immigrants from
north of the Yangtze. There are no clear material culture
links, or strong cultural affinities between Taiwan/Fujian
and the freshwater Lower Yangtze culture, despite genera-
tions of hopeful thinking (e.g. Jiao 2006), and archaeology
has been so intensive around the Lower Yangtze for this
period that it is hard to accept that we have missed such
evidence. During the third millennium, the elite culture of
the Lower Yangtze (Liangzhu) through its jade art had wide
reaching influences on other parts of China (including
Dawenkou, Early Longshan, etc.), but in many ways it
was an inward-looking culture little influenced by other
areas. If I were guessing, I would see the Lower Yangtze
as most likely a region of an isolated or extinct language
distinct from the coastal Austronesian-related groups.
From Taiwan rice spread further (Fig. 7), but its importance
in island Southeast Asia appears limited and hard evidence is
scarce. Growing evidence suggests both that some arboricul-
tural and vegecultural economies were already established in
parts of island Southeast Asia, perhaps related to the indepen-
dent development of cultivation in New Guinea (Donohue and
Denham 2010), and that substrate languages in island south-
east Asia (which probably included some Austroasiatic taro
farmers) were later subsumed by Austronesian dominance
(Blench 2010a, b). Genetic evidence is clear that pigs in most
of the region and the pacific beyond were introduced from a
mainland Southeast Asian domestication (northern Vietnam/
Yunnan) (Larson et al. 2010). On the other hand, coastal
dispersal around southern China and to Vietnam could have
been important (Zhang and Hung 2010). The early evidence
of rice in mainland Southeast Asia focuses on the lower
courses of rivers rather than their upper courses of the interior
(Castillo and Fuller 2010). Some of this coastal spread (Sagart
2008; this volume) can be seen as the earliest spread of Tai-
Kadai speakers, who subsequently moved inland, up rivers.
This hypothesis has been supported by Blench (2008b), who
attributes ethnographic traditions of tooth evulsion, facial
tattooing, multi-tongue mouth harps and snake cults to this
ancestry.
Proto-indica origins and spread
The case for early rice use in the Ganges has been dealt with
in detail. Reports from northwest India and northern Paki-
stan suggest that some rice was consumed, and presumably
planted, within this wheat- and barley-dominated zone, al-
ready during the Harappan era (2500–2000 BC), although
spikelet bases to determine domestication status are so far
unavailable. It is possible that some domestication non-
shattering had evolved here but, if so, was subsequently
replaced by introduced japonica mutations including sh4.
And it is in this context that hybridization with japonica is
hypothesized (at the end of this period after 2000 BC).
Fig. 6 Some hypotheses linking the distribution of subsistence cultures
and language affiliation for ca. 3000 BC, with indication of the dispersal
directions for north Chinese millets, middle Yangtze rice and millet
systems, and possible Dawenkou-related coastal dispersal southwards
(Tanshishan and Nanguanli). The basemap is from Fuller et al. (2011b)
and shows in grey a reconstruction of land area under wet rice cultivation
as a percentage of modern wet rice land area (the percentage scale is
indicated in the shaded bar at the right). It is presumed that wet rice
supported denser and expanding human populations. Language family
abbreviations: AA Austroasiatic, AN Austronesian, P. D r a v . Proto-
Dravidian, ST Sino-Tibetan.
Fig. 7 Some hypotheses linking the distribution of subsistence cul-
tures and language affiliation for ca. 2000 BC. Indicated are the crop
dispersal towards Southeast Asia and the diffusion of western crops
into Longshan China, and Chinese crops, notable millets westwards
and southwards (to South Asia, Yemen, Sudan). The basemap is from
Fuller et al. (2011b) and shows in grey a reconstruction of land area
under wet rice cultivation as a percentage of modern wet rice land area
(the percentage scale is indicated in the shaded bar at the right). It is
preseumed that wet rice supported denser and expanding human pop-
ulations. The Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC)is
indicated. Language family abbreviations: AA Austroasiatic, AN Aus-
tronesian, ST Sino-Tibetan. Munda languages are included in the
Austroasiatic family.
86 Rice (2011) 4:78–92
Linguistically, northwest India and the Ganges both provide
evidence for extensive substrate language influence on the
later intrusive Indo-Aryan, possibly including two distinct
language phyla (Witzel 1999,2005;Southworth2005;
Fuller 2007). These languages left a lasting impact on Indian
agricultural vocabulary, as well as that for local flora, some
fauna, and dance. That they were subsumed in Indo-Aryan
languages is no doubt partly due to elite dominance in the
post-Harappan world, but the demographic impact of true
rice agriculture, with improvedhybridizeddomesticates,
should be considered as a major motor in the rise to dom-
inance Indo-Ayran speakers and their internal spread within
India (Fig. 7). Their rice was rotated with pulses, wheat and
barley, and fully integrated with pastoralism. It is not sur-
prising then that during the second millennium BC, large
sedentary settlements become widespread throughout the
Ganges and eastern India (the plains of Orissa).
Tropical japonica from South China to Southeast Asia
In addition to potential coastal spread from Fujian or Tai-
wan, there appears to be the spread of upland rain-fed rice
and foxtail millets through the hills of south China
(Guangdong, Guangxi) and into the upland zones of South-
east Asia, perhaps 2500 to 2000 BC (Castillo and Fuller
2010; Castillo 2011), ultimately from the Daxi-Qiujialing
tradition of the middle Yangtze (Figs. 5,6and 7). In some
regions, hinted at by recent archaeobotanical evidence from
central Thailand (Weber et al. 2010), rice may have been
abandoned for a focus on millets, with rice only becoming
important again later on, as social complexity increased (see
Castillo 2011). Whether this early spread included some
early Austroasiatic speakers (AA) is unclear, but as sug-
gested by Blench (2005) much of their shared vocabulary
points to a hill cultivation and swidden culture, in which taro
(Colocasia esculenta) would have been present alongside
rice. This would seem at odds with the notion that they
spread mainly along rivers (as per Higham 2003), but it
may be that there were several different waves of Austro-
asiatic with a rice–millet wave overlying an earlier vegecul-
tural wave, which might help to account for their
widespread diversity. Might we also see some early Tai-
Kadai speakers in this area? It is presumably to this period
that western Austroasiatics, as pre-Proto-Munda speakers
(the westward AA arrow in Fig. 7), also focused on islands
of hill forest habitat and shifting cultivation moved into
India towards the hills of Orissa (Fuller 2003). Once into
areas near the Indian peninsula (perhaps broadly around
2000 BC or the centuries after), these farmers picked up
native Indian millets and pulses and domesticated sheep,
goat and zebu, in some cases apparently with connected
early Dravidian vocabulary. At this time the plains were
already occupied by more intensive, and probably denser,
rice farmers. The potential role of a distinct domestication of
aus rices connected to all or part of the Austroasiatic expan-
sion needs research. The genetic evidence of McNally et al.
(2009) indicates that aus genomes have seen substantial
hybridization both with japonica and indica rice, which
hints at a complex history of dispersal and cultural interac-
tions involved in the spread of rice within and through the
greater Bengal–Assam–Burma region.
Carry on up the Yangtze
Rice cultivation also spread up the Yangtze river into the
Sichuan basin and to Yunnan, but there is no evidence to put
this much before ca. 3000–2500 BC for Sichuan or much
before 2000 BC for Yunnan. Thus this spread took place at
about the same time as the coastal and overland spread
southwards out of the Yangtze, and early spreads of proto-
indica in India. Taken with the other spreads of japonica,we
can infer the motor of a fairly major demographic “upwell-
ing”in the middle Yangtze and the plains of eastern China
by about 3000 BC (Fig. 6). This seems likely the result of a
millennium or so of intensive paddy cultivation based on
fully morphologically domesticated rice. What was different
about the trajectory up the Yangtze was a focus on wet field
rice, whereas the Southeast Asian trajectory probably in-
volved dry rice. In addition, there appears to have been a
separate spread of millet cultivation at higher elevations
along the eastern front of the Tibetan plateau, coming down
from Gansu (Majiayao culture). Judging by millet finds in
western Sichuan and the dates of Changdu Karuo of perhaps
3000 BC (see Guedes 2011), the spread of millets, presum-
ably with some hill-focused lineages of Sino-Tibetan, was
earlier than the upriver dispersal of wet rice. Is there any
substrate evidence for Hmong-Mien in the Sichuan or
Yunnan plains, given their postulated presence in the Middle
Yangtze? Otherwise we perhaps must postulate the presence
of another branch of Austroasiatic, presumably distinct from
the vegeculturalists of further south. In any case, whatever
languages were spoken in Sichuan, their speakers might
have received rice brought upriver from the middle Yangtze
together with vocabulary descended from the same source
as the earlier loans from the middle Yangtzte (Hmong-
Mien?) to Yellow River languages (Sino-Tibetan), so disen-
tangling genetic cognates with Sino-Tibetan from two strata
of ancient loans from the same source may be a challenge.
The introduction of japonica genes and the making
of indica
This has already been reviewed more extensively above
(Fig. 4). This clearly took place in the context of growing
central Asian trade, including most proximally to South
Asia the Batria–Margiana Archaeological Complex of
Rice (2011) 4:78–92 87
fortified cities, and a broader Middle Asian Interaction
sphere (Fig. 7), by which Chinese Panicum millet was to
reach Yemen and Sudan by 2000–1700 BC (Boivin and
Fuller 2009). Even if, genetically, the Panicum millets of
South Asia prove on the whole to have a larger genetic input
from a distinct west/central Asian Panicum domestication,
there was still some genetic input from Chinese millets (see
Hunt et al. 2011), and the spread of crops into northwestern
South Asia was clearly important just after 4,000 years ago.
This period was also one of transportation revolutions on the
margins of South and Central Asia, including the first clear
evidence for the use of Bactrian camels and horses in the
Indus region (Meadow 1996). These processes of trade and
improved means of transport probably facilitated some of
the waves of Indo-Aryans who came into South Asia. This
was also an era of drier climate (Madella and Fuller 2006)
that may have pushed people from the deserts of central
Asia towards the wetter valleys like the Indus and into the
monsoon zone. Although they are symptomatic of the same
processes, there is no reason to postulate a direct connection
between Indo-Aryan arrival and japonica rice arrival in
South Asia.
The dispersal of rice throughout South Asia and beyond
The available weed data from the Ganges suggest that early
rice cultivation was essentially dry cropping, based on mon-
soon rains and seasonal flood recession, but that plausible wet
field irrigated rice may have been grown by the end of the
second millennium BC and certainly by the Iron Age (Fuller
and Qin 2009). Agricultural intensification in this period is
indicated by the adoption of cash crops like cotton and flax,
and may be linked to the emergence of social hierarchy (Fuller
2008). It is only during the Iron Age that rice cultivation (and
paddies) became more widely established through South India
and were introduced to Sri Lanka (Fig. 8). In Sri Lanka and
Tamil Nadu, the first rice seems to be associated with the
construction of larger irrigation tanks and the emergence of
hierarchical and sedentary societies. The advent of rice in the
far South must have prompted dramatic population growth,
and this may account for the very widespread distribution of
the some Dravidian languages, such as Old Tamil. This de-
mographic pulse was additional to an older Neolithic expan-
sion process associated with the earliest agriculture in South
India [based on native millets and pulses, as well as livestock
(Southworth 2005; Fuller 2003,2007,2011)]. Once these
societies became rice-growing societies, they played an in-
creasing role in long distance trade, such as the spice trade that
the Roman empire tapped into. There was also trade estab-
lished during the first millennium BC between India and
Southeast Asia (Fuller et al. 2011b), and it is possible that
the first lowland indica rices in Southeast Asia came by this
means. Rice from India also came to get established in Lower
Mesopotamia in the late centuries BC (Nesbitt et al. 2010).
Concluding remarks
While there remains much to discuss and debate on the
origins and spread of rice, as well as how this relates to
language histories, it is most important that we recognize
that gaps in our knowledge—especially geographical gaps
in archaeological data—limit the reliability of some of the
reconstructions presented above. Nevertheless, current evi-
dence, as outlined, provides a clear context in which to
frame new research in the gaps (such as Assam, Myanmar),
but also for framing updated historical linguistic hypotheses.
The archaeobotanical evidence is important for informing
genetic models and agricultural language models. In general
the archaeological record points to processes of diffusion
Fig. 8 Some hypotheses relating the rise to dominance of regional
languages and state formation built on the infilling of Asian landscapes
with intensive rice agriculture. The basemap is from Fuller et al.
(2011b) and shows in grey a reconstruction of land area under wet rice
cultivation as a percentage of modern wet rice land area (the percentage
scale is indicated in the shaded bar at the right). AN Austronesian
languages.
88 Rice (2011) 4:78–92
and adoption alongside those of migration to parallel evo-
lution as well as inspiration. Historical linguistic models and
the agricultural/language dispersal hypothesis (Bellwood
2011) may tend to emphasize the migration of farmers, but
this is only part of the story, as both the genetics of hybrid-
ized genomes and archaeological evidence indicate. As em-
phasized by Blench (2008a,b,2011b), for example, and
well discussed in South Asian linguistics circles (Witzel
1999,2005; Southworth 2005; Fuller 2007), there is wide-
spread evidence for language substrates, both agricultural
and pre-agricultural, and later state-related processes of
dominance and linguistic flattening have tended to obscure
some the earlier historical linguistic complexity. Similarly
dominant trade languages have probably also aided in the
reduction of linguistic diversity in some regions, as may
have been the case with early Indo-Aryan, Malay and some
earlier lects of Malayo-Polynesian. Just as modern DNA
samples fail to capture some of the lost diversity, both
cultivated and wild, of rice, linguistic reconstruction can
only provide part of the picture. However, by triangulating
between archaeological data points, modern genetic infer-
ences and historical linguistics, we should be better placed
to recapture and reconstruct patterns of evolutionary process
and history that brought us to where we are today. There can
be no doubt that the civilizations of Asia have histories in
which rice has been a key component, both as staple food-
stuff and as salient cultural symbol.
Acknowledgements The author is grateful to two thorough but rapid
peer reviewers and the editorial comments from Magnus Fiskesjö and
Caroline Hsing, all of which helped to improve and streamline this
article. My ideas also benefitted from the discussion during the Rice &
Language across Asia symposium at Cornell, 22–25 September 2011. I
was also was pleased to receive unpublished manuscripts on relevant
linguistic issues from George Van Driem and Roger Blench.
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