Knowledge of rice domestication and its archaeological context has been increasing explosively of late. Nearly 20 years ago rice from the Hemudu and Luojiajiao sites (FIGURE 1) indicated that rice domestication likely began before 5000 BC (Crawford 1992; Lin 1992; Yan 1990). By the late 1980s news of rice from the south-central China Pengtoushan site a thousand years older than Hemudu began to circulate (Bellwood et al. 1992; Hunan 1990; Pei 1989). Undocumented news of sites having a median date of 11,500 BP with domesticated rice has recently made the rounds (Normile 1997). In addition, the first domesticated rice in Southeast Asia, once thought to be to be older than the first rice in China, is not as old as once thought (Glover & Higham 1996: 422; Higham 1995). Finally, wild rice (Oryza rufipogon) was reported to be growing in the Yangzi valley, well outside its purported original range, making domestication there plausible (Yan 1989; 1990; 1997). Significant progress continued to be made in the 1990s and unlike research on other major crops, the literature is generally not accessible to western scholars, with some exceptions (Ahn 1993; Crawford 1992; Glover & Higham 1996; Higham 1995; MacNeish et al. 1997; Underhill 1997).

Domesticated rice (Oryza sativa) is one of the five major crops in the world and a staple food for more than 30% of the world population. Yet the question of where, when, why and how the domestication of rice originated has been, and still is, a question under debate. However, as more archaeological and archaeobotanic discoveries have recently come to light, the question of the origin of rice cultivation now seems less elusive than it was a few decades ago. To date, both archaeological and archaeobotanic discoveries seem to indicate that rice cultivation first began in the middle Yangzi Valley by 8500–8000 years BP, and subsequently expanded to south China and Southeast Asia.

The Liyang plain, located in the northwest of Hunan province, is part of the plain on the north of Dongting Lake. It is situated at longitude 111°22′30″E to 111°51′30″E, and latitude 29°35′31″N to 29°47′30″N. It is made up of the Li River, its tributaries and the alluvial plain, and occupies about 600 sq. km in area (FIGURE 1).

The plain is saucer-shaped and surrounded by small hills on three sides, joined at the eastern part to the plain north of Dongting Lake. The area is a classic ‘plate-basin’ structure. Inside its boundaries, the land is broad and flat, with small streams winding in different directions, and lakes and ponds dotting the landscape. It is 32–45 m above sea level, with an incline of 2° to 3°.

Rice, Oryza sativa L., is one of the most important cereal crops in the world, and its emergence as a domesticated subsistence plant drives much of the interest and research in archaeology in South and East Asia. The homeland of domesticated rice has been proposed as:

1 a specific area, such as India (Vavilov 1926; Ramiah & Ghose 1951), South China (Ding 1957), Southeast Asia (Spencer 1963) and the Yangtze valley in China (Yan 1982; 1989)

2 a biogeographic region, such as the so-called ‘belt region’ with a great diversity of Oryza species (Chang 1976), or

3 an ecological zone, such as coastal swamp habitats (Higham 1995).

China is one of the places for the origin of the Asian cultivated rice (Oka 1988), but there are different theories for precise locations where ancient cultivated rice first originated, including those proposing South China and Yunnan (Li 1989) or the middle and lower Yangtze River Valley (Yan 1989), or the middle Yangtze and the upper Huai River Valley (Wang 1996) as the site of the oldest rice cultivation in China. The discovery (Zhang et al. 1994) of ancient rice at Jiahu in Henan province not only pushed the history of rice agriculture in the Huai River region back to 9000 BP, but also indicated the existence of an agricultural tradition of rice cultivation in the region from the beginning of the Holocene Anathermal until the end of the Holocene megathermal.

Green foxtail (Setaria viridis) is an annual grass widely distributed over the Old World, including China, where evidence of the earliest foxtail millet domestication to date has been discovered in the Cishan assemblage, Hebei province, dated to approximately 7900–7500 BP (Institute of Archaeology CASS 1991). Isozymic analysis and interspecific cross between S. viridis and S. italica (domesticated foxtail millet) demonstrated that S. viridis is the progenitor of domesticated foxtail millet (Gao & Chen 1988; Li et al. 1945). Yet little is known about the process of millet domestication, and even less about either the botanical characteristics of S. viridis or its cultural significance regarding human domestication.

The Communist manifesto does not have much to say about the pre-capitalist societies most archaeologists deal with, and still less about the primitive societies that interest most prehistorians. (Nothing from the Manifesto makes its way, for example, into the useful compendium brought together by Godelier (1973).) Much of what Marx and Engels had to say directly about antiquity consists of unpublished sketches and passing references, and even the systematic treatment of The origins of the family, private property and the state (1884) must be considered provisional: the changes that reading Morgan (1877) had on the discussions of the Formen (1857–58) and the Anti-Dühring (1878) can only suggest that the accumulation of positive evidence in the course of a century and a half of archaeological research would have caused Marx and Engels to revise substantially every one of their specific claims.

When in the 18th century European travellers passed through the obscure Ottoman provinces of Mosul and Baghdad, in what is now Iraq, they sometimes paused to contemplate the wreckage of Nineveh and Babylon. We know today that every Mesopotamian mound is an accumulation of history, but at the time it was far from obvious that significant relics of ancient civilizations, known on Biblical authority to have existed but at the same time condemned and destroyed by Divine justice, might still survive beneath the surface of the ground.

In 1820 Claudius James Rich, British Resident in Baghdad, investigated Nineveh and heard of sculptures that had been found among the ruins, but it was 1836 before his widow published an account of his visit. That book was the catalyst for a phase of frantic exploration, between 1843 and 1855, which led ultimately to the discovery both of ancient Assyria and of an entire civilization, that of ancient Mesopotamia, which stretched back past Babylonians and Sumerians to the very evolution of writing and the dawn of history. The discoveries were more than academic. In 1848. when the first results began to be known in Great Britain, they helped undermine some of the fundamental assumptions of established society.

George Dennis’ The cities and cemeteries of Etruria, a massive two-volume work of over 1000 pages, was published towards the end of 1848, the British Museum’s copy (now the British Library’s) being received on 18 January 1849. It was quickly acclaimed as a literary and archaeological masterpiece (Rhodes 1973: 52–5; Pallottino 1955: 126, n. 1), which brought the then little-known Etruscans to life in the most vivid of ways. The fruit, in Dennis’ word, of extensive travelling in Etruria between 1842 and 1847, and of much work in the libraries of, in particular, Rome, it remains 150 years later an indispensable topographical source. Indeed, a 2nd, revised, edition appeared in 1878 (reprinted in 1883, but misleadingly entitled a 3rd edition), and a further version of the 1848 volume was published in J.M. Dent’s highly regarded ‘Everyman’ series in 1907.

The two most important 19th-century books on archaeology in the United States both dealt with earthworks. The earlier of these two, Ancient monuments of the Mississippi Valley by Ephraim G. Squier & Edwin H. Davis, was the first volume published by the fledgling Smithsonian Institution, and is 150 years old this year. It presented, with lavish illustrations, information about hundreds of earthworks. Its principal argument was that the mounds had been built by an American race distinct from the historically known indigenes, no less and perhaps considerably more than 1000 years ago. This volume in no small measure catalysed the development of archaeology in the United States. Without Squier & Davis’ extensive documentation of the vast number, size, complexity and variety of earthworks, the later book might never have been commissioned or might have been conceived in far less ambitious terms.