Papers by Jade d'Alpoim Guedes
Antiquity, 2020
The Khao Wong Prachan Valley of central Thailand is one of four known prehistoric loci of copper ... more The Khao Wong Prachan Valley of central Thailand is one of four known prehistoric loci of copper mining, smelting and casting in Southeast Asia. Many radiocar-bon determinations from bronze-consumption sites in northeast Thailand date the earliest copper-base metallurgy there in the late second millennium BC. By applying kernel density estimation analysis to approximately 100 new AMS radiocarbon dates, the authors conclude that the valley's first Neolithic millet farmers had settled there by c. 2000 BC, and initial copper mining and rudimentary smelting began in the late second millennium BC. This overlaps with the established dates for Southeast Asian metal-consumption sites, and provides an important new insight into the development of metallurgy in central Thai-land and beyond.
American Antiquity, 2019
This project considered the deposition history of a burned structure located on the Kalispel Trib... more This project considered the deposition history of a burned structure located on the Kalispel Tribe of Indians ancestral lands at the Flying Goose site in northeastern Washington. Excavation of the structure revealed stratified deposits that do not conform to established Columbia Plateau architectural types. The small size, location, and absence of artifacts lead us to hypothesize that this site was once a non-domestic structure. We tested this hypothesis with paleoethnobotanical, bulk geoarchaeological, thin section, and experimental firing data to deduce the structural remains and the post-occupation sequence. The structure burned at a relatively low temperature, was buried soon afterward with imported rubified sediment, and was exposed to seasonal river inundation. Subsequently, a second fire consumed a unique assemblage of plant remains. Drawing on recent approaches to structured deposition and historic processes, we incorporate ethnography to argue that this structure was a menstrual lodge. These structures are common in ethnographic descriptions, although no menstrual lodges have been positively identified in the archaeological record of the North American Pacific Northwest. This interpretation is important to understanding the development and time depth of gendered practices of Interior Northwest groups.
Nature Plants, 2020
T he domestication of crop species marks a major transition in human-plant interaction, and has b... more T he domestication of crop species marks a major transition in human-plant interaction, and has been responsible for the shift of humans from a hunter-gatherer to an agricultural species. There are about 24 areas in the world from which crop species originated, and attention has focused on the dynamics of the domestication process and the evolutionary genetics of crop origins and divergence 1. By contrast, relatively little attention has been focused on the dispersal and diversification of crops from their centres of origin, and the accompanying evolution of adaptive traits that enable these domesticated species to establish themselves in different environmental and cultural contexts 2. Reconstructing the patterns and timing of the spread of domesticated species can help us understand the climatic and other environmental factors that govern the expansion of their species range, as well as the relationship between crop dispersal and human migration and history. Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is a major staple crop, providing more than 20% of calories for more than half of the human population. Domesticated rice encompasses genetically distinct populations grown in sympatry, including major subgroups japonica and indica (sometimes recognized as subspecies), as well as geographically more restricted circum-aus, and circum-basmati rices 3,4. It is mainly cultivated in monsoon Asia, but rice is distributed across a wide latitudinal range, spanning tropical and temperate zones of Asia, probably requiring local water, temperature and photoperiod adaptation. Rice is grown in lowland ecosystems under paddy, deepwater or seasonal flood conditions, as well as in upland rainfed areas 5. Archaeological evidence 6-8 indicates that cultivation of japonica rice began around 9,000 yr bp in the lower Yangtze Valley, whereas proto-indica rice cultivation started more than 5,000 yr bp in the lower Ganges valley 9. Archaeological 10 and most population-genetic analyses 11-13 suggest that important domestication alleles have a single origin in japonica rice in East Asia. The spread of japonica to South Asia about 4,000 yr bp led to introgression of domestication alleles into proto-indica or local Oryza nivara populations and the emergence of indica rice 11-13. While the origins of rice have been the focus of intensive study, less attention has been paid to its spread after domestication. From the Yangtze and Ganges Valleys, respectively, japonica and indica dispersed across much of Asia over the last five millennia, providing sustenance for emerging Neolithic communities in East, Southeast and South Asia 14. Archaeological data show the general directional-ity of rice dispersal 9,15 ; however, the details of dispersal routes and times and the environmental forces that shaped dispersal patterns remain unknown. In this study we undertake population-genomic analyses to examine environmental factors associated with the geographic distribution of rice diversity, and reconstruct the ancient dispersal of rice in Asia. Together with archaeobotanical, paleocli-matic and historical data, genomic data allow a robust reconstruction of the dispersal history of O. sativa.
The Archaeology of the Early Tibetan Plateau: New Research on the Initial Peopling through the Early Bronze Age
Since the last systematic review of Tibetan archaeology in 2004 published in Journal of World Pre... more Since the last systematic review of Tibetan archaeology in 2004 published in Journal of World Prehistory (Aldenderfer and Zhang 2004), a revival of archaeological research on the plateau has begun to reshape our understanding of key issues such as when the plateau was first permanently occupied by humans, and when and how Tibetans first adopted the farming and pastoral systems that characterize the plateau today. Understanding who the first Tibetans were, and how they adapted to this high-altitude environment, both genetically and culturally, have been central themes of recent research on the plateau. We review these developments and place them into a wider regional framework with a focus on the better-known eastern Tibetan Plateau.
Increasing the productivity and yield of rice in Central Thailand has been a key focus of interna... more Increasing the productivity and yield of rice in Central Thailand has been a key focus of international and local government policy. Efforts have centered around producing a second winter season of irrigated rice. However, a series of droughts in the region have led to widespread crop failure. We carry out a re-evaluation of weather station and environmental data and combine this with new information from a key archeological site in Central Thailand, Phromthin Tai, whose occupation covers a long and critical period of Thai prehistory. Based on these data, we argue that farmers in the area employed an adaptive and resilient agricultural and wild-plant-food-based subsistence system that was adapted to the region’s high variability in rainfall. This subsistence system bridged the divide between the wild and cultivated and between wet and dry farming. The temporal and spatial diversity inherent in this system makes it vulnerable to destruction by agricultural policies that focus singly on improving yields.
Journal of Ethnobiology, 2018
Ancient farmers experienced climate change at the local level through variations in the yields of... more Ancient farmers experienced climate change at the local level through variations in the yields of their staple crops. However, archaeologists have had difficulty in determining where, when, and how changes in climate affected ancient farmers. We model how several key transitions in temperature affected the productivity of six grain crops across Eurasia. Cooling events between 3750 and 3000 cal. BP lead humans in parts of the Tibetan Plateau and in Central Asia to diversify their crops. A second event at 2000 cal. BP leads farmers in central China to also diversify their cropping systems and to develop systems that allowed transport of grains from southern to northern China. In other areas where crop returns fared even worse, humans reduced their risk by increasing investment in nomadic pastoralism and developing long-distance networks of trade. By translating changes in climatic variables into factors that mattered to ancient farmers, we situate the adaptive strategies they developed to deal with variance in crop returns in the context of environmental and climatic changes.
We describe a preliminary survey of a relatively unknown part of the eastern Himalayas: northwest... more We describe a preliminary survey of a relatively unknown part of the eastern Himalayas: northwestern Sichuan. This survey revealed that three phases of occupation are represented across the landscape. Large settlements with dense remains characterize the landscape during the Neolithic (3400-2000 CAL B.C.). Following a hiatus in occupation, stone-cist graves characterize the region during the Bronze Age (1450-800 CAL B.C.). The lack of settlement remains from this period indicates that mobile pastoralism increased in importance. Finally, between A.D. 500 and 1500, dense scatters of ceramics over a wide altitudinal range correspond to a fragmentation in Tibetan history, when local warlords established themselves in the region. While some changes in occupation and subsistence practices are linked to climate change, others relate to changes in political power. We argue that further survey work is needed to expand our understanding of past land use and the development of pastoralist practices.
(Bocinsky). This paper was submitted 22 V 17 and accepted 22 V 17. We are grateful for the insigh... more (Bocinsky). This paper was submitted 22 V 17 and accepted 22 V 17. We are grateful for the insightful comments provided by Dr. Bellezza on our paper. He raises vital points about the nature of climate and continentality. We agree with Bellezza that the low density of available weather station data from the central and western Tibetan Plateau would result in a lower degree of accuracy in any modeled reconstruction. Our analysis focused, for these reasons, on the better-understood eastern Tibetan Plateau , where higher numbers of available weather stations improve the accuracy of reconstructions. We hope that in the future more weather data from the central and western Tibetan Plateau, both areas crucial to modern Tibetan agriculture, will be made available to foreign researchers so that researchers can create a more accurate picture of changing cropland across this area. In his comment Bellezza scrutinized our definition of the altitudinal boundary of the Tibetan Plateau and how this affects interpretations of percentage of cropland allotted to agriculture. In our paper we followed the methods used by Chen et al. (2015b), who defined the northeastern Tibetan Plateau as having a lower altitudinal limit of 1,500 m asl. We agree that this lower altitudinal limit is problematic. As Bellezza points out, setting the altitudinal limit this low includes large tracts of agricultural land such as the Qaidam Basin and Xining on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau. We have recreated the analysis in our supplemental information by setting the altitudinal limit at 2,700 m asl to eliminate these areas of lower altitude.
Quaternary International, 2017
Farmer's ability to rapidly grow their populations has been seen as an advantage in allowing them... more Farmer's ability to rapidly grow their populations has been seen as an advantage in allowing them to either engulf or simply do away with foragers. Research on agriculture's spread in East Asia has followed an underlying assumption: that farming produced equally reliable returns across the vast expanse of territories into which it spread. Farmers are thus always seen as being at a demographic advantage. However, in some parts of Asia, ecological barriers to growing crops may have meant that the opposite was true. In order to illuminate how foragers and farmers might have interacted in environments marginal to crop cultivation, I argue that we first need to outline where the barriers to farmer expansion in prehistory lay. Using ecological niche modeling combined with an analysis of recent archaeological data, this paper contrasts forager farmer interaction in two different areas of the Tibetan Plateau. It argues that the higher elevation reaches of the “third pole” constituted a barrier for early millet farmers expanding into the region. In these areas foragers may have maintained a competitive advantage.
Proso millet (Panicum miliaceum L.) is a warm season grass with a growing season of 60–100 days. ... more Proso millet (Panicum miliaceum L.) is a warm season grass with a growing season of 60–100 days. It is a highly nutritious cereal grain used for human consumption, bird seed, and/or ethanol production. Unique characteristics, such as drought and heat tolerance, make proso millet a promising alternative cash crop for the Pacific Northwest (PNW) region of the United States. Development of proso millet varieties adapted to dryland farming regions of the PNW could give growers a much-needed option for diversifying their predominantly wheat-based cropping systems. In this review, the agronomic characteristics of proso millet are discussed, with emphasis on growth habits and environmental requirements, place in prevailing crop rotations in the PNW, and nutritional and health benefits. The genetics of proso millet and the genomic resources available for breeding adapted varieties are also discussed. Last, challenges and opportunities of proso millet cultivation in the PNW are explored, including the potential for entering novel and regional markets.
By documenting how humans adapted to changes in their environment that are often much greater tha... more By documenting how humans adapted to changes in their environment that are often much greater than those experienced in the instrumental record, archaeology provides our only deep-time laboratory for highlighting the circumstances under which humans managed or failed to find to adaptive solutions to changing climate, not just over a few generations but over the longue durée. Patterning between climate-mediated environmental change and change in human societies has, however, been murky because of low spatial and temporal resolution in available datasets, and because of failure to model the effects of climate change on local resources important to human societies. In this paper we review recent advances in computational modeling that, in conjunction with improving data, address these limitations. These advances include network analysis, niche and species distribution modeling, and agent-based modeling. These studies demonstrate the utility of deep-time modeling for calibrating our understanding of how climate is influencing societies today and may in the future. climate change | archaeology | computational modeling | agent-based modeling
Methods Contemporary Agriculture on the Tibetan Plateau We used the Global Land Cover–SHARE Cropl... more Methods Contemporary Agriculture on the Tibetan Plateau We used the Global Land Cover–SHARE Cropland database version 1.0 (GLC-SHARE) created by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Land and Water Division (Latham et al. 2014; available at http:// www.glcn.org/databases/lc_glcshare_en.jsp) to model the geographic and elevational extent of contemporary cropland on the Tibetan Plateau. The GLC-SHARE is a gridded data set at 30-arc-second (about 1-km) spatial resolution that is derived from satellite and other remote-sensing imagery. We compared the extent of cropland-dominant areas to the grid-registered ETOPO1 1-arc-minute resolution global relief model of elevation (figure A1; Amante and Eakins 2009; available at http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/global/). We disaggregated the ETOPO1 data set to the resolution of the GLC-SHARE data and extracted elevation data from locations that were identified as cropland-dominant in GLC-SHARE. Ninety-five percent of cropland on the Tibetan Plateau (above 1,500 m asl) is at elevations below 3,314 m asl, and 99.98% of cropland exists below 4,000 m asl (fig. A2). Preliminary quality assessment of the GLC-SHARE data set performed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations suggests a very high rate of success in identifying cropland (Latham et al. 2014); only 11.2% of cropland-dominant cells in a test sample were incorrectly identified as belonging to another land-cover class, and only 5.1% of non-cropland-dominant cells in the test sample were misidentified as being cropland dominant. Thus, the small area of cropland in our analysis identified as being above 4,000 m asl falls well within the margin of error for the GLC-SHARE data set as a whole and should not be seen as significant. This contradicts the findings of Dong et al. (2015), who argued that barley could be grown on the Tibetan Plateau up to altitudes of 4,750 m asl. Dong et al. (2015) used county-level crop and elevation data; however, each given county on the Tibetan Plateau is characterized by a wide range in elevation. By taking elevations at the center of each county, they likely exaggerated the upper elevations at which crops could be grown. Our analysis here shows that cropland is overwhelmingly constrained to river valleys below 3,300 m asl. Calibrating Radiocarbon Data Radiocarbon dates from the SETP and the NETP were acquired through a review of the relevant literature (table A1). Dates were obtained primarily from published archaeological data sets, reports, and review papers. Additional dates were obtained in earlier work by the authors of the paper. Uncalibrated radiocarbon dates (conventional radiocarbon ages) and their uncertainties are recorded in table A2, as are the laboratory numbers (where available). We calibrated the radiocarbon dates using the BchronCalibrate method from the Bchron library in R (Parnell 2014) and the IntCal13 radiocarbon age calibration curve (Reimer et al. 2013). After calibration, we estimated long-term probability density distributions from 5500 to 2000 BP using two methods (fig. 4). First, we summed the posterior probability density distributions resulting from the 14 C calibration, analogous to the Oxcal SUM command (Bronk Ramsey 2009). Second, we used the BchronDensity method in Bchron to perform Gaussian mixture density estimation on the calibrated dates. We set the number of mixture components for each Gaussian mixture model to the number of sites represented in the data; this assumes that the occupation history of a single site is well represented by a normal distribution around its radiocarbon dates. Dates on charcoal samples could (where there are old or long-lived tree species) include a substantive in-built age element biasing age estimates toward dates that are too old; however, we can regard the data from short-lived samples (millets, wheat, and barley) as approximately contemporary with use/find context. Both the short-lived data and the overall data set (including dates on charcoal) show similar distributions and, in particular, the marked decrease in evidence for human activity around 4200–3500 BP coincident with a temperature decrease (fig. 4).
The timing and mechanics of the spread of agriculture to the Tibetan Plateau—one of the most chal... more The timing and mechanics of the spread of agriculture to the Tibetan Plateau—one of the most challenging environmental contexts on earth—is a focus of recent work and debate. Understanding the timing and spread of agriculture is basic to archaeology and history worldwide. Researchers seek evidence for the earliest, furthest, or highest occurrences of diagnostic elements. However, the Tibetan Plateau case illustrates a key flaw in current work: archaeologists have often uncritically interpreted the presence of plant domesticates at archaeological sites as being indicative of local agricultural practice. This assumption neglects the long history of food exchange on the Plateau, as elsewhere in the world, even beyond what were then the limits of agriculture. The cause is a fundamental lack of understanding of where crops could be grown in prehistory. Using a formal model of the agricultural thermal niche between the 5500 BP and the present, we argue that agricultural niches on the Tibetan Plateau were tightly constrained to lower-elevation river valleys throughout time. This pattern is confirmed by analysis of the extent of modern crop production on the Plateau. The challenges deriving from these alti-tudinal constraints placed on early Tibetans largely explain how and why the Tibetan economy developed in the way that it did.
Current Anthropology, 2013
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
In Renewing the 'Search for Structure' - New Frameworks and Techniques in Instrumental Ceramics A... more In Renewing the 'Search for Structure' - New Frameworks and Techniques in Instrumental Ceramics Analysis - Alan F. Greene
Recent archeological evidence has revealed that a major transition in subsistence regimes took pl... more Recent archeological evidence has revealed that a major transition in subsistence regimes took place around the second millennium BC. This paper argues that in order for archeologists to understand transitions in subsistence regimes in the past, it is necessary to develop models capable of outlining our frames of reference. It summarizes how ecological niche models (ENM) have contributed to our understanding of the spread of agriculture to the Plateau and situates ENM within the two current paradigms used for understanding subsistence change in archeological research (Optimal Foraging Theory and Niche Construction Theory) and argues that recent advances in computing and in spatial modeling should be employed by researchers seeking to make testable hypothesis about subsistence change on the Tibetan Plateau.
This paper explores how changes in sea level and biome distribution may have affected the habitat... more This paper explores how changes in sea level and biome distribution may have affected the habitats occupied by hunter-gatherers in East Asia. Using a modelbased reconstruction of changing sea level from the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) to present day, our analysis reveals that the exposure of a large continental shelf during the LGM sea level lowstand created a wealth of wooded, estuarine, and coastal biomes that could have been exploited intensively by Late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers. Models explaining hunter-gatherer subsistence changes and migrations in this period should take into account the large area that has been lost to rising sea level since the LGM. C 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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Papers by Jade d'Alpoim Guedes
A diverse and highly regarded group of scholars reference a broad array of literature from around the world as they cover their areas of expertise in the practice and theory of paleoethnobotany—starch grain analysis, stable isotope analysis, ancient DNA, digital data management, and ecological and postprocessual theory.
The only comprehensive edited volume focusing on method and theory to appear in the last twenty-five years, Method and Theory in Paleoethnobotany addresses the new areas of inquiry that have become central to contemporary archaeological debates, as well as the current state of theoretical, methodological, and empirical work in paleoethnobotany.
Moving agriculture into the highlands of the Tibetan plateau, was a challenging process. A crop cultivars phenology determines the ecological niche this species is able to occupy. Short growing seasons, cold winters and spring frost mean that the Tibetan plateau presented considerable challenges to the movement of domesticates into this region. By using ecological niche modeling, this paper outlines the constraints associated with practicing a range of different crops on the Tibetan plateau and in the foothills of the Himalayas. This data is interpreted in the light of new archaeobotanical evidence from the Plateau itself and the western Sichuan highlands.
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