The Checkered Prehistory of Rice Movement Southwards as a Domesticated Cereal-from the Yangzi to the Equator

This paper discusses the origins of Oryza sativa japonica rice cultivation in the Yangzi region of China and asks how and with which migrating human populations it spread south to reach Taiwan by 3,000 BC and Southeast Asia by 2,000 BC. The perspective adopted is that the spread of rice was driven mainly by demographic expansion, associated with a spread of languages and archaeological material culture. Environmental barriers also played major roles in establishing a "pause, adapt, spread, pause again" mode of movement, such barriers relating to availability of rainfall and alluvial land, latitude (photoperiodism) and climatic seasonality, and the prior presences of other populations, in some cases with vegetative gardening systems that did not involve rice or other cereals. Contingency also played its part in rice history, as we can see with the inability of this crop to spread into Oceania in part due to the route followed by Neolithic colonizers

Holocene Population History in the Pacific Region as a Model for Worldwide Food Producer Dispersals

Pacific prehistory (excluding Australia) since 3000 BC reflects the impacts of two source regions for food production: China from the Yangzi southward (including Taiwan) and the western Pacific (especially the New Guinea Highlands). The linguistic (Austronesian, Trans-New Guinea), bioanthropological/ human genetic, and Neolithic archaeological records each carry signals of expansion from these two source regions. A combined consideration of the multiregional results within all three disciplines (archaeology, linguistics, and biology) offers a historical perspective that will never be obtained from one discipline or one region alone. The fundamental process of human behavior involved in such expansion-population dispersal linked to increases in human population size-is significant for explaining the early spreads of food production and language families in many parts of the world. This article is concerned mainly with the archaeological record for the expansion of early food producers, Austronesian languages, and Neolithic technologies through Taiwan into the northern Philippines as an early stage in what was to become the greatest dispersal of an ethnolinguistic population in world history before AD 1500

4000 Years of Migration and Cultural Exchange

The project reported on in this monograph has been concerned with the archaeology of the Batanes Islands, an archipelago that must have been settled quite early in the process of Austronesian dispersal from Taiwan southwards into the Philippines. A multi-phase archaeological sequence covering the past 4000 years for the islands of Itbayat, Batan, Sabtang and Siayan is presented, extending from the Neolithic to the final phase of Batanes prehistory, just prior to the late 17th century arrivals of foreign navigators such as Jirobei (Japan) and William Dampier (England), followed by the first Spanish missionaries. So far, no traces of preceramic settlement have been found in Batanes, but the archaeological sequence there from the Neolithic onwards, like that in the Cagayan Valley in northern Luzon, is now one of the best-established in the Philippines