Cereals, calories and change: exploring approaches to quantification in Indus archaeobotany

Abstract

Several major cereal groups have been identified as staples used by the pre-urban, urban and post-urban phase populations of the Indus Civilisation (3200-1500 BCE): wheat, barley, a range of small hulled millets and also rice, though their proportional exploitation is variable across space and over time. Traditional quantification methods examine the frequency, intensity and proportionality of the use of these crops and help ascertain the 'relative importance' of these cereals for Indus populations. However, this notion of 'importance' is abstracted from the daily lives of the people using these crops and may be biased by the differential production (as well as archaeological survival) of individual cereals. This paper outlines an alternative approach to quantifying Indus cereals by investigating proportions of calories. Cereals are predominantly composed of carbohydrates and therefore provided much of the daily caloric intake among many late Holocene farming populations. The four major cereal groups cultivated by Indus farmers, however, vary greatly in terms of calories per grain, and this has an impact on their proportional input to past diets. This paper demonstrates that, when converted to proportions of calories, the perceived 'importance' of cereals from five Indus sites changes dramatically, reducing the role of the previously dominant small hulled millet species and elevating the role of Triticoid grains. Although other factors will also have affected how a farmer perceived the role and importance of a crop, including its ecological tolerances, investments required to grow it, and the crop's role in the economy, this papers suggests that some consideration of what cereals meant in terms of daily lives is needed alongside the more abstracted quantification methods that have traditionally been applied.

A Journey to the West: The Ancient Dispersal of Rice Out of East Asia

“…Rice cultivation was well-established across the Ganges region by the mid-third millennium BC and much of India and southeast Asia by the mid-second millennium BC (Fuller 2002(Fuller , 2005(Fuller , 2006(Fuller , 2011aFuller and Madella 2002;Saraswat 2005;Tewari et al 2008;Fuller et al 2010;Madella 2014;Silva et al 2018). Its significance as a summer crop in seasonal rotation systems appears to have been geographically variable, and scholars have noted that farming systems across India were dynamic through time and space (Petrie and Bates 2017;Bates et al 2017b).…”

Feeding the herds: Stable isotope analysis of animal diet and its implication for understanding social organisation in the Indus Civilisation, Northwest India

“…One can also imagine a potentially related scenario whereby C 3 plant foods became less available through time, perhaps due to changing climate or changing social or environmental circumstances leading to a decline in available arable land. In this scenario, sheep and goat may have been competing with humans for C 3 plant foods and/or farmland, and sheep and goat diets were deliberately shifted towards C 4 plants, either to ensure that people had better access to C 3 plant foods like wheat and rice or because C 4 plant foods became more abundant, which is suggested by the available archaeobotanical evidence from the same sites (Bates, 2016;Bates et al, 2017Bates et al, , 2018). An alternative suggestion might be that, for some reason, the mobility patterns of sheep and goat was reduced and therefore more direct foddering was necessary.…”

Environmental effects on the spread of the Neolithic crop package to South Asia

“…It is important to note that not everywhere in the Harappan domain these crops had the same importance; in Gujarat, for example, they seem to be poorly represented. In northwest India, the archaeobotanical record of Mature Harappan sites attests the ubiquity of barley, the presence of wheat and the mixing of these crops with native millets [ 28 ]. Sites of the Kot Diji phase (ca.…”