Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: The Relationship Among Environment, Culture And Agricultural Intensification

Washington University, Saint Louis MO

Investigators

Abstract

Over the last 10,000 years, agriculture has gradually replaced hunting and gathering, and became the globally dominant food resource. Agricultural productivity provides a solid foundation for population growth, social complexity and the emergence of cities and states. However, there is a huge intellectual gap between our understanding of the earliest domestication and cultivation of limited crops and intensive agriculture practiced by early states. How was agriculture intensified over time? What resources were required to intensify food production? What is the driving force behind the processes of agricultural intensification? Questions concerning agricultural intensification have attracted but also puzzled scholars in various fields for a long time. Within this broader context, Dr. Tristram R. Kidder and Mr. Zhen Qin, of Washington University in St. Louis, will undertake research in the Central Plain of China to explore the process of agricultural intensification, defined as an increase in the productive output per unit of land, and its relationship with environmental change. This project will provide first-hand field data on buried agricultural fields and therefore be helpful for both testing ideas about agriculture put forth in historical written documents and gaining new comprehension of agricultural intensification; it will also make theoretical contribution to agricultural intensification from an site-specific, bottom-up perspective by use of well-preserved archaeological datasets. Beyond academia, this project also has broader impacts. Firstly, it will contribute to the local community by recruiting local people to do fieldwork, including coring, test excavation, and sampling. Through their participation, a deeper understanding of their history and identity will be gained. Secondly, this project will be carried out in collaboration with the local institute and this collaboration will promote mutual understanding and trust through the team working and reciprocal learning between U.S. and Chinese researchers who are from different cultural traditions. To obtain a further understanding of how agricultural intensification was achieved and why agriculture was intensified, Dr. Kidder, Mr. Qin and their collaborators in China will conduct a large-scale excavation of ancient fields, a systematic collection of soil samples, and a comprehensive analysis of geoarchaeological results. The excavation will be carried out at Sanyangzhuang site, Neihuang County, Henan Province in central China. In this site, three strata of ancient agricultural field with ridge-and-furrow features, have been found. Based on these unique relics well preserved by the Yellow River flood sediments, the research team will explore the question of "how" by examining the field management techniques, including plowing, manuring, and irrigation, as an implementation path of agricultural intensification; micromophology and elemental analysis also will be deployed. For the question of "why", local paleoenvironment will be reconstructed and environment-induced risks, such as climate changes and the Yellow River floods, will be investigated as one of major driving forces of agricultural intensification by means of isotopic analysis and conventional geoarchaeological analysis.