A stable isotope perspective on archaeological agricultural variability and Neolithic experimentation in India

Agriculture has been crucial in sustaining human populations in South Asia across dramatically variable environments for millennia. Until recently, however, the origins of this mode of subsistence in India have been discussed in terms of population migration and crop introduction, with limited focus on how agricultural packages were formulated and utilised in local contexts. Here, we report the first measurements of stable carbon and nitrogen isotope values in well-preserved charred crop remains from sites spanning the Neolithic/Chalcolithic to the Early Historic in two very different environmental zones: tropical East India and the semi-arid Deccan. The results show that this approach offers direct insight into prehistoric crop management under contrasting environmental constraints. Our preliminary results plausibly suggest that early farmers in India experimented with and made strategic use of water and manure resources in accordance with specific crop requirements and under varying environmental constraints. We suggest that the development of modern crop isotope baselines across India, and the application of this methodology to archaeological assemblages, has the potential to yield detailed insight into agroecology in India's past

Iron Age in Southeast Asia

In this paper, I shall discuss the issue of the Iron Age in Southeast Asia under two headings - mainland Southeast Asia and island Southeast Asia. On the mainland, I shall discuss the evidence from Vietnani, Thailand and Peninsular Malaysia, but exclude Burma, Laos and Kampuchea for lack of relevant data. In the islands, I will discuss Indonesia, Sabah, Sarawak and the Philippines. I would argue that the Iron Age as a separate cultural entity is evident on the mainland, but in the islands there is no identifiable Bronze Age preceding the adoption of iron. By the Iron Age, I mean a period associated with iron artefacts, wet rice farming, brisk internal exchange and external trade and, in the lowland at least, a ranked society. This corresponds roughly to the General Period C of Bayard (1984b, 163, see also Higham and Kijngam 1984, 13-21). But two points should be made about this scheme: <ol><li>This is a heuristic device, so all sites in Southeast Asia can not be easily fitted into it.</li><li>There is as yet no general agreement among scholars regarding the chronology of various periods.</li></ol