Semi-Arid grasslands produce sharp seasonal pulses of growth, with much biomass locked into durable annual grains. Once humans developed ways to process and store these hard seeds, these landscapes became prime zones for cultivation and eventually agriculture.
This talk will compare the evidence for agricultural origins in such settings as the African Sahel, western Asia, southern India, and northern China. Although the domestication processes were broadly similar--slow, millennia long increases in yield that deepened human dependance on cultivated grasses--the grains themselves differed in inherent productivity. These differences shaped regional demographic and territorial dynamics.
Professor Dorian Fuller, University College of London, Institute of Archaeology.
Dorian Q. Fuller is Professor of Archaeobotany at University College London. He is a specialist in seed identification and works on past agricultural systems and plant domestication across many regions, including archaeological fieldwork in Sudan and Ethiopia, Turkey and Iraq, Morrocco, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, and China. He completed his BA at Yale University (1995), and PhD on the Emergence of Agricultural Societies of South India at Cambridge University. He joined the faculty at UCL in 2000.
