Robert Spengler

During the first millennium A.D., Central Asia was marked by broad networks of exchange and interaction, what many historians collectively refer to as the Silk Road. Much of this contact relied on high-elevation mountain valleys, often linking towns and caravanserais through alpine territories. This cultural exchange is thought to have reached a peak in the late first millennium A.D., and these exchange networks fostered the spread of domesticated plants and animals across Eurasia. However, few systematic studies have investigated the cultivated plants that spread along the trans-Eurasian exchange during this time. New archaeobotanical data from the archaeological site of Tashbulak (800-1100 A.D.) in the mountains of Uzbekistan is shedding some light on what crops were being grown and consumed in Central Asia during the medieval period. The archaeobotanical assemblage contains grains and legumes, as well as a wide variety of fruits and nuts, which were likely cultivated at lower elevations and transported to the site. In addition, a number of arboreal fruits may have been collected from the wild or represent cultivated version of species that once grew in the wild shrubby forests of the foothills of southern Central Asia in prehistory. This study examines the spread of crops, notably arboreal crops, across Eurasia and ties together several data sets in order to add to discussions of what plant cultivation looked like in the central region of the Silk Road.

This study presents a high-resolution, chronologically well-constrained pollen record from Lake Kushu (45
2505800N, 141
0200500E) and a record of archaeobotanical remains from the nearby Hamanaka 2 archaeological site. The pollen record suggests continuous long-term cooling, which parallels the decline in Northern Hemisphere summer insolation. This cooling trend is overlaid by several rather quick transitions towards cooler conditions (ca. 5540/5350, 1550, and 390 cal BP) and one distinct decadalscale cold event around 4130 cal BP. These shifts, on one hand, correspond with major hemispherical or global-scale climate transitions/events, including the ‘Holocene Climate Transition’, the onset of the ‘Dark Ages Cold Period’ main phase, the ‘Little Ice Age’, and the ‘4.2 kiloyear event’, respectively. On the other hand, the shifts partly coincide with transformations in the Hokkaido prehistoric cultural sequence including the onset of the Middle Jomon (ca. 5000 cal BP), the Middle/Late Jomon transition (ca. 4000 cal BP), the immigration of Okhotsk culture groups (from ca. 1500 cal BP), and the establishment of the Classic Ainu culture (ca. 350 cal BP). AMS radiocarbon dating of charred macrobotanical remains from Hamanaka 2 suggests three discontinuous occupational periods ca. 390-50 BCE, 420-970 CE, and from 1640 CE, which correspond to the northern Hokkaido Epi Jomon (ca. 300-100 BCE), Okhotsk (ca. 500-1000 CE), and Classic Ainu (ca. 1600-1868 CE) cultural phases, respectively. While impact on the island's natural environments (forest clearance) was marginal during the Epi Jomon phase, it became significant during the Okhotsk and the Classic Ainu culture phases.

In the early 1980s Naomi Miller changed the field of palaeoethnobotany; her research into whether the ancient seed eaters of southwest Asia were human or herbivore opened an ongoing debate over the impact that burning of animal dung had on the formation of archaeobotanical assemblages, and how researchers can differentiate between human and animal food remains. As the number of systematic archaeobotanical studies across West Asia and many other parts of the world increase, we are continually confronted with the question of the significance of dung burning. Herd animal dung is the dominant fuel source in many parts of West Asia today and the high densities of seeds of wild plants in archaeobotanical assemblages suggest that people were using dung as fuel across Inner Asia for millennia. Seed assemblages that represent herd animal dung are assisting scholars in understanding palaeoecology and herd animal diet in the past as well as human economy and pasturing practices. However, interpreting these assemblages is not always simple and there are predictable biases that need to be taken into account, notably an overrepresentation of endozoochoric seeds (seeds dispersed through animal ingestion). In West Asia, the most prominent of such seeds in dung assemblages are from the Amaranthaceae family, notably Chenopodium. Keywords Central Asia · Archaeobotany · Palaeoethnobotany · Dung burning · Chenopodium · Fuel · Endozoochory

This paper discusses archaeobotanical remains of naked barley recovered from the Okhotsk cultural layers of the Hamanaka 2 archaeological site on Rebun Island, northern Japan. Calibrated ages (68% confidence interval) of the directly dated barley remains suggest that the crop was used at the site ca. 440–890 cal yr AD. Together with the finds from the Oumu site (northeastern Hokkaido Island), the recovered seed assemblage marks the oldest well-documented evidence for the use of barley in the Hokkaido Region. The archae-obotanical data together with the results of a detailed pollen analysis of contemporaneous sediment layers from the bottom of nearby Lake Kushu point to low-level food production, including cultivation of barley and possible management of wild plants that complemented a wide range of foods derived from hunting, fishing, and gathering. This qualifies the people of the Okhotsk culture as one element of the long-term and spatially broader Holocene hunter– gatherer cultural complex (including also Jomon, Epi-Jomon, Satsumon, and Ainu cultures) of the Japanese archipelago, which may be placed somewhere between the traditionally accepted boundaries between foraging and agriculture. To our knowledge, the archaeobo-tanical assemblages from the Hokkaido Okhotsk culture sites highlight the northeastern limit of prehistoric barley dispersal. Seed morphological characteristics identify two different barley phenotypes in the Hokkaido Region. One compact type (naked barley) associated with the Okhotsk culture and a less compact type (hulled barley) associated with Early–Mid-dle Satsumon culture sites. This supports earlier suggestions that the " Satsumon type " barley was likely propagated by the expansion of the Yayoi culture via southwestern Japan,

For well over a century scholars from across the social and biological sciences have been trying to understand the origins and spread of agriculture. This debate is often intertwined with discussions of climate change and human environmental impact. Over the past decade, this debate has spread into Central Eurasia, from western China to Ukraine and southern Russia to Turkmenistan, a part of the world often thought to have been largely dominated by pastoralists. A growing interest in the prehistory of Central Eurasia has spurred a new chapter in the origins of agriculture debate; archaeobotanical research is showing how important farming practices in this region were in regards to the spread of crops across the Old World. While early people living in Central Eurasia played an influential role in shaping human history, there is still limited understanding of the trajectories of social evolution among these populations. In March of 2015, thirty leading scholars from around the globe came together in Berlin, Germany, to discuss the introduction and intensification of agriculture in Central Eurasia and adjacent regions. At the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, these scholars presented novel data on topics covering East, South, and Central Asia, spanning a wide realm of methodological approaches. The present special edition volume deals with a selection of the papers given at this conference, and it marks a significant step toward recognizing the contribution of Central Eurasian populations in the spread and development of agricultural systems over the course of the Holocene.

This book is an edited volume of essays by leading international scholars from half a dozen different countries and over a dozen different research institutes concerning the character, timing, and geography of large-scale migrations connecting Inner Asia to northeast Asia and eventually to all corners of the New World during the Upper Paleolithic (specifically between 17,000 and 13,000 years ago). The authors come from a variety of disciplines and apply several different methodologies to discuss “Great Migrations” in Asia and the Americas. The 12 chapters are the result of a 3-day international conference co-organized by the Embassy of the Republic of Kazakhstan and the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, the second international conference on “Great Migrations” spearheaded His Excellency Erlan Idrissov. This volume, as with the conference, deals with the timing, routes, cultural aspects, and human ecology of the demographic growth and diffusion of people across the Americas, as well as the earliest people to live in Inner and northeastern Asia.

Likeall humans, mobile pastoralists alter their eco- logical niche to their advantage; however, archaeological dis- cussions of mobile pastoralists in Central Asia often focus on environmental factors as a sole driving force in decision making. In reality, anthropogenic modification of the land- scape are evident as far back at the Bronze Age. Herders altered the overall ecology of the region by converting forest into pasturelands and indirectly enhanced focal points on the landscape through herding processes. These ecological nodes are locations with higher nutrient-rich biomass, their produc- tivity is further enhanced through grazing. Hence, the overall processofherdinginCentralAsiahasconstructedanicheover the long-term that is better suited for this economic pursuit.

The foods we eat have a deep and often surprising past. Many foods we consume today—from almonds and apples to tea and rice—have histories can be traced along the tracks of the Silk Road out of prehistoric Central Asia to European kitchens and American tables. Organized trade along the Silk Road dates to at least Han Dynasty China in the second century B.C., but the exchange of goods, ideas, cultural practices, and genes along these ancient trading routes extends back five thousand years. Balancing a broad array of archaeological, botanical, and historical evidence, Fruit from the Sands presents the fascinating story of the origins and spread of agriculture across Inner Asia and into Europe and East Asia. Through the preserved remains of plants in archaeological sites, Robert N. Spengler III identifies the regions where our most familiar crops were domesticated and follows their routes as people carried them around the world. Vividly narrated, Fruit from the Sands explores how the foods we eat have shaped the course of human history and transformed consumption all over the globe.