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Food globalisation in prehistory: The agrarian foundations of an interconnected continent

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Peer-reviewed

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Article

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Abstract

This article explores grain crop movement across prehistoric Eurasia. It draws on evidence from archaeobotany, stable isotope studies, and archaeogenetics to date and map the process of food globalisation, and relate it to human consumption, culinary practice and crop ecology. It reviews the findings of a project funded by the European Research Council, Food Globalization in Prehistory, placed in the context of the expansion of research across Eurasia over the last two decades. This major episode of food globalisation has discernible roots in the third millennium BC, which during the second millennium BC fully crystallises into a contiguous network following foothills and mountain corridors with the Himalayan uplift at its heart. We infer a significant bottom-up component to the establishment of this pattern, which serves as a prelude for the top-down valley-bottom agrarian systems that recur from the second millennium BC onwards.

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Keywords

$\textit{Panicum}$, $\textit{Setaria}$, $\textit{Triticum}$, $\textit{Hordeum}$, Neolithic, Bronze Age, Asia

Journal Title

Journal of the British Academy

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

2052-7217
2052-7217

Volume Title

4

Publisher

British Academy
Sponsorship
The authors are grateful to the European Research Council, under grant 249642 (FOGLIP), the Leverhulme Trust, under grant f/09717/C (PPAC), Darwin College, National Project of Philosophical and Social Sciences of China, under grant 12&ZD151, and the European Union Structural Funds project, Postdoctoral Fellowship Implementation in Lithuania, for financial support.