ABSTRACT
The origin of agriculture represents a particularly important transition in human prehistory. By producing food through cultivating plants, and to a lesser degree by herding animals, it became possible to store surpluses which could support larger settled populations (sedentism and increased population density), and specialist occupations (non-food producers). Agriculture created the potential for much greater rates of population increase. The demographic differentiation between the idealized early farmer and hunter-gatherer has been a fundamental assumption for many powerful models of prehistoric population change, genetic change and language spread (e.g. Bellwood 2005). Within this context, rice agriculture is usually considered to be an essential factor underlying the Holocene migrations that are supposed to have created cultural geography of much of China as well as Southeast Asia (e.g. Bellwood 2005; Higham 2003). The hard evidence for the timing, geography and evolutionary processes involved in the establishment of rice agriculture is, however, rather limited and ambiguous. Such evidence will be crucial to any story of agricultural origins and dispersal in East Asia. This chapter considers an alternative hypothesis, the late domestication of rice, which sees much of the evidence for early rice as reflecting foraging and a long period of incipient cultivation of still wild plants.
