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Radical change and dietary conservatism: Mixing model estimates of human diets along the Inner Asia and China’s mountain corridors

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Repository DOI


Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Liu, X 
Reid, REB 
Matuzeviciute, GM 
Jones, MK 

Abstract

Recent research has demonstrated that a series of mountains from the eastern Iranian Plateau to eastern Kazakhstan and to western China played a significant role in trans-Eurasian exchange during the third and second millennia BC. In close association with these mountain corridors, a number of southwestern Asian cereals, notably free threshing wheat and barley, moved eastward, and broomcorn millet, among other plant foods originating in China, moved westward. In this paper, we apply Bayesian stable isotope mixing models to published and newly obtained isotopic data in order to quantitatively estimate the contribution of different food resources to human diets, and we consider the complexity of human food strategies at both ends of these mountain corridors: southern Kazakhstan and the Hexi Corridor in western China. Our results contrast the rapid adoption of wheat and/or barley in the Hexi Corridor with the gradual, incremental adoption of millet in southern Kazakhstan during the second millennium BC.

Description

Keywords

barley, isotopes, millet, mountain corridor, mixing model, wheat

Journal Title

Holocene

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0959-6836
1477-0911

Volume Title

26

Publisher

SAGE Publications
Sponsorship
European Research Council (249642)
The authors are grateful to European Research Council, under grant 24964 (FOGLIP), Washington University Deanery Office Grant, American Association of University Women (AAUW), International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability (I-CARES) for financial support. We are thankful to Catherine Kneale and James Rolfe from Cambridge for assistance with isotopic analysis. We are also grateful to Pavel Tarasov for helps to the manuscript; and to Professors Mayke Wagner and Pavel Tarasov and Dr Robert Spengler for organizing the workshop, entitled ‘The Introduction and Intensification of Agriculture in Central Eurasia’, Berlin in 2015.