Shifting cultivators in South Asia: Expansion, marginalisation and specialisation over the long term

Kingwell-Banham, Eleanor; Fuller, Dorian Q.

doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2011.05.025

Cited by 62 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Wheat and barley subsequently spread southwards after 4000 years ago. This early farming was focused initially on the drier savannah corridor and some dry deciduous woodland areas down the middle of the Indian peninsula Fuller, 2011]. plant, took place after 1000 BC and was more restricted towards coastal regions and the far south, especially near population centers Fuller et al, 2010].…”

Section: Hydroclimatology Of the Indian Peninsula And Bay Of Bengalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aridification of the Indian subcontinent during the Holocene : implications for landscape evolution, sedimentation, carbon cycle, and human civilizations

Ponton¹

2012

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The Indian monsoon affects the livelihood of over one billion people. Despite the importance of climate to society, knowledge of long-term monsoon variability is limited. This thesis provides Holocene records of monsoon variability, using sediment cores from river-dominated margins of the Bay of Bengal (off the Godavari River) and the Arabian Sea (off the Indus River). Carbon isotopes of terrestrial plant leaf waxes (6 13 Cwax) preserved in sediment provide integrated and regionally extensive records of flora for both sites. For the Godavari River basin the 61 3 Cwax record shows a gradual increase in aridity-adapted vegetation from ~4,000 until 1,700 years ago followed by the persistence of aridity-adapted plants to the present. The oxygen isotopic composition of planktonic foraminifera from this site indicates drought-prone conditions began as early as -3,000 years BP. The aridity record also allowed examination of relationships between hydroclimate and terrestrial carbon discharge to the ocean. Comparison of radiocarbon measurements of sedimentary plant waxes with planktonic foraminifera reveal increasing age offsets starting -4,000 yrs BP, suggesting that increased aridity slows carbon cycling and/or transport rates. At the second site, a seismic survey of the Indus River subaqueous delta describes the morphology and Holocene sedimentation of the Pakistani shelf and identified suitable coring locations for paleoclimate reconstructions. The 6 3 Cwax record shows a stable arid climate over the dry regions of the Indus plain and a terrestrial biome dominated by C 4 vegetation for the last 6,000 years. As the climate became more arid 4,000 years, sedentary agriculture took hold in central and south India while the urban Harappan civilization collapsed in the already arid Indus basin. This thesis integrates marine and continental records to create regionally extensive paleoenvironmental reconstructions that have implications for landscape evolution, sedimentation, the terrestrial organic carbon cycle, and prehistoric human civilizations in the Indian subcontinent. 3 4A mi Tito y mi Sense, por haberme despertado el interes por la Ciencia. 5Creo muy poco en lo que veo. Y de lo que me cuentan... nada.-Juan Siyago 6 Acknowledgements I am indebted to my Advisors for their unconditional support and generosity with their ideas and their time. Thank you for keeping me afloat when the seas were rough and I had started to drown. I learned that persistence is key and Science is humbling. Through this journey Liviu's tenacity and strong guidance, and Tim's enthusiasm and optimistic outlook delivered me safely to shore.I will like to thank my committee members and Chair for their invaluable contributions to improve this thesis, but most importantly for their continuous support, concern and encouragement through out these years. Delia, for always being my advocate and offering your experience to suggest alternative solutions. Valier, I have learned immensely from you in the lab and our discussions have always been frui...

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Section: Hydroclimatology Of the Indian Peninsula And Bay Of Bengalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aridification of the Indian subcontinent during the Holocene : implications for landscape evolution, sedimentation, carbon cycle, and human civilizations

Ponton¹

2012

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“…Evidences from a recent meta-analysis published by van Vliet et al [9] suggest that these swidden cultivators are mostly located in the mountainous and hilly parts of Latin America, Central Africa and Southeast Asia (SEA). Based on the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) Web of Science database (8 October 2013), swidden agriculture is mainly practiced by smallholder farmers in a conservative estimate of 64 developing countries ( Figure 1, [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25]) from Africa, Latin America, and South/Southeast Asia. Forty-five of them are part of the United Nations collaborative initiative on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (or the UN-REDD Programme) partner countries (currently 48 in total).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It shows that the monitoring of swidden agriculture will greatly contribute to implementing and managing the REDD projects [10]. [9,[11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Review of Swidden Agriculture in Southeast Asia

et al. 2014

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Swidden agriculture is by far the dominant land use system in the mountainous regions of Southeast Asia (SEA). It provides various valuable subsistence products to local farmers, mostly the poor ethnic minority groups. Controversially, it is also closely connected with a number of environmental issues. With the strengthening regional economic cooperation in SEA, swidden agriculture has experienced drastic transformations into other diverse market-oriented land use types since the 1990s. However, there is very limited information on the basic geographical and demographic data of swidden agriculture and the socio-economic and biophysical effects of the transformations. International programs, such as the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD), underscore the importance of monitoring and evaluating swidden agriculture and its transition to reduce carbon emission due to deforestation and forest degradation. In this context, along with the accessibility of Landsat historical imagery, remote sensing based techniques will offer an effective way to detect and monitor the locations and extent of swidden agriculture. Many approaches for investigating fire occurrence and burned area can be introduced for swidden agriculture mapping due to the common feature of fire relatedness. In this review paper, four broad approaches involving spectral signatures, phenological characteristics, statistical theory and landscape ecology were summarized for swidden agriculture delineation. Five research priorities about swidden agriculture involving remote sensing techniques, spatial pattern, change, drivers and impacts were proposed accordingly. To our knowledge, a synthesis review on the remote sensing and outlook on swidden agriculture has not been reported yet. This review paper aims to give a comprehensive overview of swidden agriculture studies in the domains of debated definition, trends, remote sensing methods and OPEN ACCESSRemote Sens. 2014, 6 1655 outlook research in SEA undertaken in the past two decades.

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“…Stone et al 1990;Stump 2013), parts of East Asia (e.g. Fuller and Qin 2009;Weisskopf et al 2014Weisskopf et al , 2015, and south and eastern India (Morrison 1992;Kingwell-Banham et al 2012;Weisskopf et al 2014Weisskopf et al , 2015, which are dominated by summer rainfall. In these instances, where rainfall primarily comes in the one season, crop species suited to those water availability regimes were exploited, and farming activities were concentrated in particular times of the year.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Multi-cropping’, Intercropping and Adaptation to Variable Environments in Indus South Asia

Petrie

Bates

2017

J World Prehist

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Past human populations are known to have managed crops in a range of ways. Various methods can be used, singly or in conjunction, to reconstruct these strategies, a process which lends itself to the exploration of socio-economic and political themes. This paper endeavours to unpack the concept of 'multi-cropping' by considering diversity and variation in the cropping practices of the populations of South Asia's Indus Civilisation. It argues that nuanced interpretations of the evidence provided by the combinations of crop seeds and weeds present in specific contexts and phases of occupation can reveal much about Indus cropping strategies, which in turn enables consideration of issues related to adaptation, intensification and resilience in the face of changing social, political, economic and environmental climates.

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Shifting cultivators in South Asia: Expansion, marginalisation and specialisation over the long term

Cited by 62 publications

References 22 publications

Aridification of the Indian subcontinent during the Holocene : implications for landscape evolution, sedimentation, carbon cycle, and human civilizations

Aridification of the Indian subcontinent during the Holocene : implications for landscape evolution, sedimentation, carbon cycle, and human civilizations

A Review of Swidden Agriculture in Southeast Asia

‘Multi-cropping’, Intercropping and Adaptation to Variable Environments in Indus South Asia

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