Palaeobotanical and Etymological Evidence for the Prehistory of South Asian Crop Plants

This chapter brings botanical and palaeobotanical ¹ information on South Asian crop plants together with etymological data on the histories of plant names, in an effort to illuminate the historical relationships between plants and human societies in South Asia. As I noted in an earlier paper (Southworth 1988), relationships between social groups and the plant world form a basic part of human culture and subsistence patterns, and are therefore important in the study of social – as well as linguistic – history.