Rahman Mizanur, Castillo Cristina Cobo, Murphy Charlene, Rahman Sufi Mostafizur, Fuller Dorian Q
1Department of Archaeology, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Jahangirnagar University, Savar, Dhaka 1342 Bangladesh.
2School of Archaeology, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX1 2PG England.
Archaeol Anthropol Sci. 2020;12(1):37. doi: 10.1007/s12520-019-00991-5. Epub 2020 Jan 15.
The present paper reports the first systematic archaeobotanical evidence from Bangladesh together with direct AMS radiocarbon dates on crop remains. Macro-botanical remains were collected by flotation from two sites, Wari-Bateshwar (WB), an Early Historic archaeological site, dating mainly between 400 and 100 BC, with a later seventh century AD temple complex, and Raghurampura Vikrampura (RV), a Buddhist Monastery () located within the Vikrampura city site complex and dating to the eleventh and sixteenth centuries AD. Despite being a tropical country, with high rainfall and intensive soil processes, our work demonstrates that conventional archaeobotany, the collection of macro-remains through flotation, has much potential towards putting together a history of crops and agricultural systems in Bangladesh. The archaeobotanical assemblage collected from both sites indicates the predominance of rice agriculture, which would have been practiced in summer. Spikelet bases are of domesticated type rice, while grain metrics suggest the majority of rice was probably subspecies The presence of some wetland weeds suggests at least some of the rice was grown in wet (flooded) systems, but much of it may have been rainfed as inferred from the Southeast Asian weed . Other crops include winter cereals, barley and possible oat, and small numbers of summer millets (, , ), a wide diversity of summer and winter pulses (14 spp.), cotton, sesame and mustard seed. Pulse crops included many known from India. Thus, while most crops indicate diffusion of crops from India eastwards, the absence of rice could also indicate some diffusion from Southeast Asia. The later site RV also produced evidence of the rice bean (), a domesticate of mainland Southeast Asia. These data provide the first empirical evidence for reconstructing past agriculture in Bangladesh and for the role of connections to both India and mainland Southeast Asia in the development of crop diversity in the Ganges delta region.
本文报告了来自孟加拉国的首个系统的考古植物学证据以及对作物遗迹的直接加速器质谱放射性碳测年结果。通过浮选从两个遗址采集了大型植物遗迹，一个是早期历史考古遗址瓦里 - 巴泰什瓦尔（WB），其年代主要在公元前400年至100年之间，还有一个公元7世纪后期的寺庙建筑群；另一个是位于维克拉姆布尔城市遗址内的拉古拉姆普拉维克拉姆布尔（RV）佛教寺院，其年代为公元11世纪和16世纪。尽管孟加拉国是一个热带国家，降雨量大且土壤过程强烈，但我们的研究表明，传统考古植物学，即通过浮选收集大型遗迹，在梳理孟加拉国作物和农业系统历史方面具有很大潜力。从这两个遗址采集的考古植物组合表明，水稻农业占主导地位，水稻种植可能在夏季进行。小穗基部属于驯化型水稻，而谷粒测量数据表明大多数水稻可能是[具体亚种未明确写出]亚种。一些湿地杂草的存在表明至少部分水稻是在湿地（水淹）系统中种植的，但从东南亚杂草推断，大部分水稻可能是靠雨水灌溉的。其他作物包括冬季谷物、大麦和可能的燕麦以及少量夏季小米（[具体种类未明确写出]）、多种夏季和冬季豆类（14种）、棉花、芝麻和芥菜籽。豆类作物中有许多是在印度已知的。因此，虽然大多数作物表明作物是从印度向东扩散的，但[具体某种]水稻的缺失也可能表明有一些是从东南亚扩散而来的。较晚的RV遗址还发现了来自东南亚大陆的驯化作物饭豆的证据。这些数据为重建孟加拉国过去的农业以及印度和东南亚大陆在恒河三角洲地区作物多样性发展中的联系作用提供了首个实证证据。
