Katie Manning

The contribution of rice agriculture and livestock pastoralism to prehistoric methane levels An archaeological assessment

We review the origins and dispersal of rice in Asia based on a data base of 443 archaeobotanical reports. Evidence is considered in terms of quality, and especially whether there are data indicating the mode of cultivation, in flooded (‘paddy’ or ‘wet’) or non-flooded (‘dry’) fields. At present it appears that early rice cultivation in the Yangtze region and southern China was based on wet, paddy-field systems from early on, before 4000 bc, whereas early rice in northern India and Thailand was predominantly dry rice at 2000 bc, with a transition to flooded rice documented for India at c. 1000 bc. On the basis of these data we have developed a GIS spatial model of the spread of rice and the growth of land area under paddy rice. This is then compared with a review of the spread of ungulate livestock (cattle, water buffalo, sheep, goat) throughout the Old World. After the initial dispersal through Europe and around the Mediterranean (7000–4000 bc), the major period of livestock expansion is after 3000 bc, into the Sub-Saharan savannas, through monsoonal India and into central China. Further expansion, to southern Africa and Southeast Asia dates mostly after 1000 bc. Based on these two data sets we provide a quantitative model of the land area under irrigated rice, and its likely methane output, through the mid to late Holocene, for comparison to a more preliminary estimate of the expansion of methane-producing livestock. Both data sets are congruent with an anthropogenic source of later Holocene methane after 3000 bc, although it may be that increase in methane input from livestock was most significant in the 3000–1000 bc period, whereas rice paddies become an increasingly significant source especially after 2000 bc.

The chronology of culture: a comparative assessment of European Neolithic dating approaches

Archaeologists have long sought appropriate ways to describe the duration and floruit of archaeological cultures in statistical terms. Thus far, chronological reasoning has been largely reliant on typological sequences. Using summed probability distributions, the authors here compare radiocarbon dates for a series of European Neolithic cultures with their generally accepted ‘standard’ date ranges and with the greater precision afforded by dendrochronology, where that is available. The resulting analysis gives a new and more accurate description of the duration and intensity of European Neolithic cultures.

Potter communities and technological tradition in the Lower Tilemsi Valley, Mali

The Tilemsi Valley has long been heralded as a focal region in the development of West African cultural complexity. The Lower Tilemsi Valley Project began in 2005, with the aim of clarifying the archaeological significance of this region and refining its chronology. This paper examines the pottery from these excavations, advocating an integrative approach to analysis in which pottery production is located within an historical and socio-economic context. It does not present a reified ‘type’ of Lower Tilemsi pottery, but instead describes a regional-scale technological tradition, whilst focusing on the local scale of adaptive change and technical innovation.

Identity, fashion and exchange: pottery in West Africa

This is the second in a series of planned themed issues of Azania, following the spring 2010 issue on early East African food production. The papers presented here arise from a five-day symposium held in December 2008 at the Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire and the Musée Théodore Monod d’Art Africain in Dakar, involving a collaborative team of archaeologists and ethnographers specialising in impressed ceramics from the West African Sahara-Sahelian region. This symposium built on a first meeting in Oxford earlier in the year, during which we developed a systematic framework for the classification of fibre roulettes. While the objective of that first symposium was to establish common terminologies for the analysis of impressed pottery, the Dakar meeting aimed to illustrate the necessity of such an endeavour: specifically, the way in which clearer and more robust ceramic classification schemes can be used to inform us about past social and cultural change. Six of the 11 papers presented in Dakar are collected here. All make the argument that by confronting archaeological and ethnographic data we can better understand the role of ceramics in mediating and tracking social interaction and cultural change. The six authors make use of data drawn from studies of present-day potting techniques and apprenticeship networks to derive implications for the past. Drawing on extensive ethnographic works, Olivier Gosselain revisits a fundamental question why decorate? and thus establishes the foundations of this special issue. What aspects of social organisation, and what scale of social interaction, are represented in the choice and adoption of different decorative types? Katie Manning explores the potential of ceramics in shedding light on micro-scale processes in the archaeological record, by examining aspects of stylistic experimentation and village identity in the Tilemsi Valley of Mali. At the other end of the scale, Kevin MacDonald, also working with examples from Mali, questions the classification of archaeological ceramic cultural entities by highlighting the complex and often highly personal processes by which researchers develop them. Dealing with more recent archaeological materials, both Anne Haour and Anne Mayor offer wide regional overviews (of the central Sahel and the Niger Bend respectively) to examine the impact of political influences on stylistic homogenisation, while Sokhna Ndèye Guèye explores

Mobility, Climate Change and Cultural Development. A Revised View from the Lower Tilemsi Valley, Northeastern Mali

The Lower Tilemsi Valley in northeastern Mali has long been heralded as a key region in the later prehistory of Sub-Saharan West Africa. And yet, archaeological investigations in this region have been both sparse and sporadic. This project was initiated in 2005 with the aim of refining the chronology and archaeological significance of the region in regard to Late Stone Age (LSA) cultural development along the Sahara Sahel borderlands. An important aspect of it has been the economic organisation of Lower Tilemsi society, specifically the role of pastoral mobility, and its relationship with early millet agriculture, and the spatial organisation of craft production and consumption. The seemingly late appearance of cereal agriculture in Africa (outside the Nile Valley) has meant that LSA pastoral groups along the Sahara Sahel borderlands have often been portrayed uncritically as highly nomadic. New data from the Lower Tilemsi Valley challenge these assumptions, revealing evidence for increasing territoriality and heterogeneous economic organisation by the mid-third millennium CAL BC. Over the course of three seasons of survey and excavation, 86 multi-period sites were mapped and a sample of seven LSA sites, as well as one Iron Age furnace site, were excavated. At Karkarichinkat Nord, a fully articulated cow burial with associated wooden structure and evidence for related feasting in the primary occupation levels, indicates increasing territoriality by the mid-third millennium CAL BC. The subsequently rapid and dense occupation of the region introduced a fully developed agro-pastoral economy with domesticated pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum) from the start of occupation. These finds predate other known occurrences of domesticated pearl millet in Africa or India by at least 500 years and suggest that the origins of domesticated pearl millet must lie even further back in time. Finally, the excavations revealed evidence for incipient craft and subsistence specialisation, which appears to have supported a large and inter-dependent population. In conclusion, the thesis considers what these new discoveries signify for current understandings of LSA cultural development along the Sahara Sahel borderlands and places the Lower Tilemsi Valley into its wider temporal and geographic context.

On the relevance of the European Neolithic

Sustainability, culture change, inequality and global health are among the much-discussed challenges of our time, and rightly so, given the drastic effects such variables can have on modern populations. Yet with many populations today living in tightly connected geographic communities—cities, for example—or in highly networked electronic communities, can we still learn anything about societal challenges by studying simple farming communities from many thousands of years ago? We think there is much to learn, be it Malthusian pressures and ancient societal collapse, the devastating effects of European diseases on indigenous New World populations or endemic violence in pre-state societies (e.g. Pinker 2012). By affording a simpler, ‘slow motion’ view of processes that are greatly accelerated in this century, the detailed, long-term record of the European Neolithic can offer insight into many of these fundamental issues. These include: human adaptations to environmental change (Palmer & Smith 2014), agro-pastoral innovation, human population dynamics, biological and cultural development, hereditary inequality, specialised occupations and private ownership.