the SpreAd of Settled Agriculture Medieval Asian and Pacific societies benefited from ample and freely available productive land that supported the basic economic needs of the region, wh
Trang 1and ensured regular economic and cultural contact among
the various urban centers of Asia
the SpreAd of Settled Agriculture
Medieval Asian and Pacific societies benefited from ample
and freely available productive land that supported the basic
economic needs of the region, which was generally
under-populated before 1500 Asians and Pacific islanders moved
from less fertile to more productive unoccupied areas by foot
or boat; they also migrated as the result of natural
catastro-phes (such as volcanic eruptions and earthquakes), prolonged
unfavorable weather conditions, environmental or geological
change, or to avoid contact with other mobile and potentially
hostile populations The geography of the region is diverse
The several dry and less fertile zones included China’s Gobi
Desert, southern Asia’s Thar Desert, and the many desert
re-gions of Australia; the rugged mountainous rere-gions, such as
the Himalayas, that surround the northern borders of
south-ern Asia; the sparsely settled volcanic Southeast Asian and
Pacific islands where mountains and jungle coincide; and the
substantial grasslands of central Asia and Australia, where
there was a pastoral tradition and where meat and milk
prod-ucts, rather than grains, were dietary staples
Before the medieval era the rich alluvial soils of the
In-dus, the Ganges, and the Yellow River plains of northern
India and northern and central China had sustained the
transition from upland shifting to settled, lowland
cultiva-tion This move was supported by new technology, such as
improved tools, better water management, and a sense of
sea-sonality, which included the use of a calendar; all these
im-provements allowed farmers to cultivate lands that had been
useless swampland or that had been subject to heavy annual
flooding By the early medieval era settled and increasingly
populous village societies in other regions of Asia were
culti-vating millet and other traditional grains
The traditional Asian productive units were family
cen-tered and based in a village The Chinese village was a
collec-tion of tradicollec-tional extended-family households that consisted
of the male family head, his wife, their children, his parents,
and his brothers and their wives and children Japanese
vil-lage households were nuclear, consisting of the male head
of family, his wife, their children, and his parents Brothers
established branch households by clearing new lands or by
colonizing frontiers The other regions of Asia and the Pacific
had local variations of these
Wet-rice cultivation became common in Southeast Asia,
central and southern China, coastal southern Asia, the region
of present-day Sri Lanka, southern Japan, and southern
Ko-rea from 500 to 1000 c.e Initially in the aKo-reas of modern-day
Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam wet-rice seeds were
dis-tributed at the beginning of the monsoon season on a plowed floodplain that had been divided into small fields bordered and contained by elevated earth The rice seedlings matured after the terraced fields annually flooded with the water of monsoon-swelled rivers and lakes The wet-rice crop grew quickly and needed little work, and it was harvested after the floodwaters receded
Other regions of Asia adapted a more labor-intensive transplanted seedling method that was developed in the Cham regions of today’s central and southern Vietnam
in the first centuries c.e In contrast to the broadcasting method, seed was annually sown in small, flooded seedling beds before rather than at the beginning of the rainy sea-son While seedlings took root, farmers and their families prepared nearby terraced fields; they weeded and broke
up soil with wooden, stone, or metal-tipped hoes until the monsoon rains soaked the earth Seedlings then were trans-planted by hand with enough space between them for each plant to grow
In the wet-rice regions of Asia there were three food sta-ples: rice, fish, and coconuts Rice might be affected by peri-odic disease, rodents, and insects Fish (from the ocean, rivers, flooded rice fields, or fish farming in water-storage tanks) and coconuts, however, were virtually free of pests and diseases Fish usually was dried or fermented and was the major gar-nish to rice Properly prepared, rice and fish could be stored for more than a year Coconuts (the source of fruit, sugar, oil, and palm wine) could not be stored as long but were available
at three-month intervals
Most people ate rice, whether dry or wet, in preference to other grains or starches Reliance upon other staples was so-cially unacceptable except during rice famines, when rice cul-tivators could normally turn to root crops (such as taro and tapioca, which were grown as supplemental crops in wet-rice areas) and yams (which were gathered from nearby forests or were cultivated in rain-fed fields) Sago palms were another alternate source of starch During the dry season local popu-lations grew a variety of vegetables such as beans, tomatoes, and peppers Early Asian rice cultivators also supplemented their diet by networking with highland hunters and gather-ers, in part to negate the highlanders’ potential to raid their productive villages but also to exchange their diverse agri-cultural produce for meat and forest products, such as wood, bamboo, and tree resins
Despite potentially high productivity, with the exception
of China urbanization in the early wet-rice producing regions was unusual In part this was due to cultural preference, the geographical isolation of the productive regions, the intensive communal labor commitments of wet-rice cultivation, and the seeming lack of need for supralocal political commitment
320 economy: Asia and the Pacific