The (Revised) History of Rice

Several years ago, I wrote an article on the history of rice, detailing the current scholarly understanding of how rice was domesticated and spread throughout the world. Since that time, many academic articles have been written on the subject, many of which contradicted each other: one thing about controversy, it makes it difficult to write lucid articles for the general public .

The primary issue of where and when rice was domesticated was debated across many disciplines, including genetics, linguistics, geology and archaeology: the issues were in part based on what constitutes evidence of domestication, but also interpreting the evidence identified in the genetics of the plant. The breadth of the discussion begins, in the Yangtze Valley of China, but spreads to include the domestication events in the Indian subcontinent and Africa. In these areas, controversy was focused on whether the appearance of rice was a continuation of the spread of rice from China, or a secondary, independent domestication event or events.

A symposium of papers called "Rice and Language Across Asia: Crops, Movement, and Social Change," held at Cornell University, Ithaca, USA, on September 22-25, 2011, brought together many of the scholars working on these problems. In December those papers were published in a special issue of the journal Rice, bringing a considerable amount of discussion and a new idea concerning the domestication of rice. Clearly it was time to update.

• See the History of Rice Part 1, Rice Domestication in China
• See the History of Rice Part 2, The Spread of Rice Domestication Outside of China
• See the complete bibliography