The Evolution of Millet Agriculture in North China

Robert Bettinger gives a talk on the appearance of millet agriculture in North China around 8000 B.P.

Friday, May 2
3:15 PM - 4:30 PM

Robert Bettinger, Professor of Anthropology, UC Davis

Of the seven known cases worldwide in which agriculture evolved independently, the appearance of millet agriculture in North China around 8000 B.P. is perhaps the least understood because it has never been archaeologically connected to the hunter-gatherer base from which it had to evolve. There are no multi-component forager-to-farmer sites and early millet sites frequently show little or no technological continuity with the intensive hunter-gatherer complexes considered ancestral to them. Recent excavations at the Dadiwan site in the western Loess Plateau, document this sequence for the first time.

Beginning before 50,000 B.P., with or just before the arrival of modern Homo sapiens in North China, the Dadiwan record spans the transition to intensive hunting and gathering, then to incipient, and finally intensive, agriculture. In contrast to the Near East and Mesoamerica, where intensive hunting and gathering developed in-situ and the transition from it to intensive agriculture was prolonged, the intensive hunter-gatherer adaptation ancestral to Dadiwan millet agriculture did not develop locally and agricultural intensification was rapid. Evolutionary theory helps explain this difference.

Robert Bettinger has worked almost continuously in northern China (Gansu, Ningxia, and Inner Mongolia) since 1989, collaborating with a team of US and PRC scholars interested in understanding the Pleistocene-Holocene transition and the origins of agriculture in north China. His archaeological fieldwork has centered on the study of intensive hunter-gatherer adaptations, their expression in marginal environments (alpine and desert), and their connection with early agriculture.