Island South Asia and Oceania
Another world region for which scholars have generated major bodies of lexical evidence relating to early agricultural history is island South Asia and Oceania. The evidence from, in particular, the Austronesian language family depicts a complex history of agricultural change across these areas.
This history began with the settlement of the speakers of proto-Austronesian on the island of Taiwan in the fifth and fourth millennia bce. Sometime in the fourth millennium, one descendant society of the proto-Austronesians, the ancestral Malayo-Polynesians, moved southwards from Taiwan, first to the Philippines and then to parts of Indonesia. Still later, after 1500 bce, peoples of the Oceanic sub-branch of the Malayo-Polynesians scattered far out into the Pacific.[105]The lexical evidence is clear that the speakers of the proto-Austronesian language were indeed cultivators of rice and other grains and not just intensive collectors. Their possession of a noun specifically connoting seed rice (*bineSiq) is one diagnostic indicator. They also had a word that served as a noun for cultivated garden and a verb for the activity of cultivating it (*qumah); a noun for uncultivated land (*quCaN); and a verb for clearing a field for cultivation (*tebaS). At least two other words diagnostic of cultivation - for fallow field (*talun) and for weeding (*babaw) - trace back to the next era, the proto-Malayo-Polynesian period.[106]
A fascinating feature of Austronesian agricultural history, as revealed in the lexical evidence, is how greatly the focus and content of their agricultural practices changed as the early Austronesian communities spread outwards into new environments. The proto-Austronesians brought to Taiwan an already evolving grain-based cultivating system from the lower Yangtze region. Rice was of high salience in their culture.
Their subsistence vocabulary included words specifying the rice plant (*pajay), harvested rice (*beRas), cooked rice (*Semay), rice stalks left standing after harvest (*zaRami), and rice husk (*qeCa). They also knew of at least three varieties of millet (*baCar, *zawa), including foxtail millet (*beCep), already under cultivation in mainland China by that time. In contrast, only a single ancient word for a tuber plant traces back to the proto-Austronesian language, a term specifically for wild rather than domesticated taro (*biRaq).But when the proto-Malayo-Polynesians moved south into island South Asia, they adopted a whole additional suite of plants, indigenous to the highly tropical environment into which they moved. The proto-Malayo- Polynesians, but not their earlier proto-Austronesian ancestors, possessed words for yam (*qubi) as well as domesticated taro (*tales) and for banana (*punti), sugarcane (*CebuS), breadfruit (*kuluR), sago (*Rambia), and coconut (*niuR). And whereas a term for wild pig (*babuy) goes back to proto-Austronesian, a term for the domestic pig (*beRek) traces only to the proto-Malayo-Polynesian stage, suggesting that the adoption of domestic pigs dates to no earlier than around the fifth or fourth millennium among Austronesian-speaking peoples.[107]
The spread of the Oceanic branch of the Malayo-Polynesians into the Pacific brought about still further changes in the inherited agricultural repertoire. The speakers of the proto-Oceanic language were the makers of the Lapita culture of that era. This identification of language with culture rests on an exceedingly great number of detailed, point-for-point correlations between the archaeological record of Lapita material culture and the reconstructed lexicons of proto-Oceanic material culture, from agriculture to fishing to boat-building to houses and residence patterns.[108]
The earliest Lapita sites appeared in the Bismarck archipelago in western Oceania around 1500 bce.
Within the next five hundred years, various descendant communities of the proto-Oceanic speakers began a rapid dispersal outwards into the Pacific. Some groups moved to the nearby coasts of Papua New Guinea, settling among the long-established farming populations of that island. But the major thrust of these expansions went eastwards, to the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, and then from those island regions both northwards to Micronesia and further eastwards to Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa. Later eras of expansion spread the peoples of the Polynesian subgroup of Oceanic from Samoa to as far east as Easter Island and as far north as Hawaii. These communities continued to cultivate a number of the tropical crops of their proto-Malayo-Polynesian ancestors, among them taro (*talo; PAN *tales), the greater yam (*qupi; PMP *qubi), sago (*Rabia; PMP *Rambia), bananas (*pudi; PMP *punti), breadfruit (*kulaR; PMP *kuluR; also *baReqo), coconut (*niuR), and sugarcane (*topu; PMP *CebuS). They also raised the aerial yam (*pwatik). But most strikingly, they seem to have entirely ceased to grow any of the Asian grain crops, dropping from their crop repertory even the old staple crop of the proto-Austronesians, rice.[109]A secondbody of linguistic resources, of immense potential for the history of agricultural origins across island South Asia and western Oceania but as yet little studied, is the Trans-New Guinea language family. The early speakers of this family of languages were the likely originators of the independent development of agricultural ways of life in New Guinea, underway as long ago as the eighth millennium bce. How much did the adoption of new tropical crops, such as bananas and taro, by the early Malayo-Polynesian communities who spread from the fourth millennium bce onwards into island South Asia owe to interactions with those already evolving farming societies? To what extent perhaps also did the knowledge and practices of the foraging peoples who lived in other parts of those island regions contribute to these changes? Where, for example, did the various words for the new tropical plants in proto-Malayo-Polynesian and in the Oceanic subgroup of Malayo-Polynesian come from? Will we be able someday to show that at least some of these terms are loanwords from the Trans-New Guinea family, and thus indicators of the transmission of this knowledge from peoples of that language family?[110]
These matters remain open and fascinating prospects for future research.
Reconstructing in detail the histories of agricultural lexicons in the TransNew Guinea language family, a work still in its infancy, would contribute greatly to this project, as would similarly detailed studies of the other nonAustronesian languages of island South Asia.For the nearby regions of mainland eastern and southern Asia, on the other hand, the potential contribution of linguistic evidence to the history of agriculture remains mostly unexplored. The Sino-Tibetan family of languages offers an especially complex challenge in these respects because so much more remains to be learned about the internal relationships among the languages of the family and about its ancient vocabulary of subsistence. A recent proposal suggests that the earliest speakers of Sino- Tibetan may have originated in areas close to the eastern end of the Himalaya range as much as 6000 or 7000 years ago. According to this view, they may at first have combined gathering and hunting with the raising of root and tuber crops, but did not cultivate rice, which has usually been the most important crop among Sino-Tibetan peoples in more recent times.[111] A second Asian language family in which a systematic reconstruction of the ancient lexicon of agriculture remains a future project of great importance is Austroasiatic, which includes such languages as Vietnamese and Khmer in Southeast Asia and the Munda group in eastern India.
Early agriculture and language in Southwest Asia
The Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic phylum affords an additional case study, similar in the complexity of its evidence to the Austronesian and the several African cases, with relevance to our understanding of the early rise of agriculture in a quite different region, the Middle East. The reconstructed subsistence lexicon of proto-Semitic reveals that a developed, mixed farming economy, with both crops and domestic animals, sustained the proto-Semitic society. A noun for a cultivated field (*haql-) and verbs for cultivation (*hrt-) and for sowing seed (*drf-) certify to the primacy of crop-raising.
The protoSemites raised several grain crops, notably wheat (*hint-), emmer (*kunat-), and millet (*duhn-), along with such subsidiary crops as leeks (*karat-), cucumbers (*kVrV?-), garlic (*tum-), and cumin (*kammun-). Their tree crops included figs (*ti?n-), almonds (*taqid-), and pistachios (*butn-), and they also raised grapes (*?inab- ‘grape'; *gapn- ‘grape vine') and made wine (*wayn-) from them. In addition, they herded a variety of domestic animals, as their verbs for herding (*r?y-) and for watering (*sqy-) livestock, as well as their breeding terminologies, make clear. Their most important animals appear to have been sheep (*2immar-; *rahil- ‘ewe'; *?atud- ‘ram (?)'; *lV?V?- ‘lamb (?)'; *saw- ‘flock of sheep') and goats (*?inz- ‘she-goat'; *tays- ‘he-goat'; *⅛rit- ‘male kid'; *?VnVq- ‘female kid'; *sa?n- ‘mixed flock, goats and sheep'). They also raised cows (*li?-; *tawr- ⅛ull'; *?alp- ‘steer') and donkeys (*humar- ‘male donkey'; *7atan- ‘female donkey').[112]But these findings take us back no earlier than the middle Holocene at the earliest. The proto-Semitic language dates most probably to around 4000 bce, several thousand years after the beginnings of cultivation and animal domestication in Southwest Asia.[113] Are there other possible linguistic resources that might carry this picture further back in time? The Caucasian family of languages, today restricted mostly to the areas around the Caucasus mountains, used to extend from the western edges of Iran through Anatolia, as the written records of the extinct ancient Caucasian languages, Hattic, Hurrian, and Urartian, reveal. Because these areas formed an important part of the originating regions of Middle Eastern agriculture in the early Holocene, the proto-Caucasian agricultural lexicon is a prime candidate for future investigation.[114]