Browsing by Author "Jennifer Bates"

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Adaptation to Variable Environments, Resilience to Climate Change: Investigating land, water and settlement in Indus northwest India
(University of Chicago Press, 2017) Cameron A. Petrie; Ravindra N. Singh; Jennifer Bates; Yama Dixit; Charly A. I. French; David A. Hodell; Penelope J. Jones; Carla Lancelotti; Frank Lynam; Sayantani Neogi; Arun K. Pandey; Danika Parikh; Vikas Pawar; David I. Redhouse; Dheerendra P. Singh
This paper explores the nature and dynamics of adaptation and resilience in the face of a diverse and varied environmental and ecological context using the case study of South Asia’s Indus Civilization (ca. 3000–1300 BC). Most early complex societies developed in regions where the climatic parameters faced by ancient subsistence farmers were varied but rain falls primarily in one season. In contrast, the Indus Civilization developed in a specific environmental context that spanned a very distinct environmental threshold, where winter and summer rainfall systems overlap. There is now evidence to show that this region was directly subject to climate change during the period when the Indus Civilization was at its height (ca. 2500–1900 BC). The Indus Civilization, therefore, provides a unique opportunity to understand how an ancient society coped with diverse and varied ecologies and change in the fundamental environmental parameters. This paper integrates research carried out as part of the Land, Water and Settlement project in northwest India between 2007 and 2014. Although coming from only one of the regions occupied by Indus populations, these data necessitate the reconsideration of several prevailing views about the Indus Civilization as a whole and invigorate discussion about human-environment interactions and their relationship to processes of cultural transformation. © 2017 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.
Correction to: Cereals, calories and change: exploring approaches to quantification in Indus archaeobotany (Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, (2018), 10, 7, (1703-1716), 10.1007/s12520-017-0489-2)
(Springer Verlag, 2019) Jennifer Bates; Cameron A. Petrie; Ravindra N. Singh
The original version of this article, unfortunately, contained an error. An acknowledgement of funding was incomplete. The acknowledgements have been updated and now read as followed: This research was carried out as a part of J. Bates’s PhD research, which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Analysis was carried out in the George Pitt Rivers laboratory in the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge. Samples were provided by the Land, Water, Settlement project, co-directed by C.A. Petrie and R.N. Singh, which is a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and Banaras Hindu University that was carried out with the support of the Archaeological Survey of India. The Land, Water, Settlement project was funded by the UK India Education Research Initiative, British Academy Stein Arnold Fund, Isaac Newton Trust, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and the Research Councils UK. The contribution made by C.A. Petrie was supported by funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no 648609). Additional fieldwork funding for J. Bates was provided by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Rouse-Ball Research Fund, Cambridge India Partnership Fund, Division of Archaeology Fieldwork Fund and Trinity College Projects Fund. The authors would also like to thank Prof. Martin Jones, Prof. Dorian Fuller, Prof. Marco Madella, Dr. Michèle Wollstonecroft and Dr. Rachel Ballantyne for their advice and help. © 2018, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.
Exploring Indus crop processing: combining phytolith and macrobotanical analyses to consider the organisation of agriculture in northwest India c. 3200–1500 bc
(Springer New York LLC, 2017) Jennifer Bates; Ravindra Nath Singh; Cameron A. Petrie
This paper presents a preliminary study combining macrobotanical and phytolith analyses to explore crop processing at archaeological sites in Haryana and Rajasthan, northwest India. Current understanding of the agricultural strategies in use by populations associated with South Asia’s Indus Civilisation (3200–1900 bc) has been derived from a small number of systematic macrobotanical studies focusing on a small number of sites, with little use of multi-proxy analysis. In this study both phytolith and macrobotanical analyses are used to explore the organisation of crop processing at five small Indus settlements with a view to understanding the impact of urban development and decline on village agriculture. The differing preservation potential of the two proxies has allowed for greater insights into the different stages of processing represented at these sites: with macrobotanical remains allowing for more species-level specific analysis, though due to poor chaff presentation the early stages of processing were missed; however these early stages of processing were evident in the less highly resolved but better preserved phytolith remains. The combined analyses suggests that crop processing aims and organisation differed according to the season of cereal growth, contrary to current models of Indus Civilisation labour organisation that suggest change over time. The study shows that the agricultural strategies of these frequently overlooked smaller sites question the simplistic models that have traditionally been assumed for the time period, and that both multi-proxy analysis and rural settlements are deserving of further exploration. © 2016, The Author(s).
Hoofprints in the yard: The discovery of bovid, caprid and (large) feline/canid tracks in an external courtyard from the early Iron Age of Tokwa, India
(Elsevier Ltd, 2025) Jennifer Bates; Vikas Kumar Singh; Ravindra Nath Singh; Manisha Singh; Brij Mohan; Sudarshan Chakradhari; Matthew Conte; Olzbayar Gankhuyag; Nathaniel James; Rakesh Jollu; Snigdha Konar; S. Dasaratha Kumar; Arun K. Pandey; Kim Pangyu; Abhay P. Singh; Anisha Singh; Sunil K. Singh; Urvashi Singh
Humans and animals have co-existed throughout our evolution, but evidence for this often comes in the form of death assemblages – animal bones. Evidence of the lived experience of animals in human spaces instead often has to come from secondary sources like stress marks on bone, imagery, artefacts and texts. In this paper we report evidence for animals exploring human habitation spaces in the form of hoof and paw prints left in wet plaster floors at the early Iron Age site of Tokwa, India. The tracks come from three separate animal groups – bovid, caprid and large feline/canid – and show presence at different moments in floor use through their presence in different plaster layers. This repeated use of a human habitation space, specifically outside courtyards, shows animals freely roaming through the area, and highlights not only biodiversity hidden from the site's zooarchaeological record, but also the intersection of multi-species lived experiences on a day-to-day basis that would otherwise not be visible over the millennia. © 2025
How to 'downsize' a complex society: An agent-based modelling approach to assess the resilience of Indus Civilisation settlements to past climate change
(IOP Publishing Ltd, 2020) Andreas Angourakis; Jennifer Bates; Jean-Philippe Baudouin; Alena Giesche; M. Cemre Ustunkaya; Nathan Wright; Ravindra N. Singh; Cameron A. Petrie
The development, floruit and decline of the urban phase of the Indus Civilisation (c.2600/2500-1900 BC) provide an ideal opportunity to investigate social resilience and transformation in relation to a variable climate. The Indus Civilisation extended over most of the Indus River Basin, which includes a mix of diverse environments conditioned, among other factors, by partially overlapping patterns of winter and summer precipitation. These patterns likely changed towards the end of the urban phase (4.2 ka BP event), increasing aridity. The impact of this change appears to have varied at different cities and between urban and rural contexts. We present a simulation approach using agent-based modelling to address the potential diversity of agricultural strategies adopted by Indus settlements in different socio-ecological scenarios in Haryana, NW India. This is an ongoing initiative that consists of creating a modular model, Indus Village, that assesses the implications of trends in cropping strategies for the sustainability of settlements and the resilience of such strategies under different regimes of precipitation. The model aims to simulate rural settlements structured into farming households, with sub-models representing weather and land systems, food economy, demography, and land use. This model building is being carried out as part of the multi-disciplinary TwoRains project. It brings together research on material culture, settlement distribution, food production and consumption, vegetation and paleoenvironmental conditions. © 2020 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd
Journey to the east: Diverse routes and variable flowering times for wheat and barley en route to prehistoric China
(Public Library of Science, 2017) Xinyi Liu; Diane L. Lister; Zhijun Zhao; Cameron A. Petrie; Xiongsheng Zeng; Penelope J. Jones; Richard A. Staff; Anil K. Pokharia; Jennifer Bates; Ravindra N. Singh; Steven A. Weber; Giedre Motuzaite Matuzeviciute; Guanghui Dong; Haiming Li; Hongliang Lü; Hongen Jiang; Jianxin Wang; Jian Ma; Duo Tian; Guiyun Jin; Liping Zhou; Xiaohong Wu; Martin K. Jones
Today, farmers in many regions of eastern Asia sow their barley grains in the spring and harvest them in the autumn of the same year (spring barley). However, when it was first domesticated in southwest Asia, barley was grown between the autumn and subsequent spring (winter barley), to complete their life cycles before the summer drought. The question of when the eastern barley shifted from the original winter habit to flexible growing schedules is of significance in terms of understanding its spread. This article investigates when barley cultivation dispersed from southwest Asia to regions of eastern Asia and how the eastern spring barley evolved in this context. We report 70 new radiocarbon measurements obtained directly from barley grains recovered from archaeological sites in eastern Eurasia. Our results indicate that the eastern dispersals of wheat and barley were distinct in both space and time. We infer that barley had been cultivated in a range of markedly contrasting environments by the second millennium BC. In this context, we consider the distribution of known haplotypes of a flowering-time gene in barley, Ppd-H1, and infer that the distributions of those haplotypes may reflect the early dispersal of barley. These patterns of dispersal resonate with the second and first millennia BC textual records documenting sowing and harvesting times for barley in central/eastern China. © 2017 Liu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Weather, Land and Crops in the Indus Village Model: A Simulation Framework for Crop Dynamics under Environmental Variability and Climate Change in the Indus Civilisation
(MDPI, 2022) Andreas Angourakis; Jennifer Bates; Jean-Philippe Baudouin; Alena Giesche; Joanna R. Walker; M. Cemre Ustunkaya; Nathan Wright; Ravindra Nath Singh; Cameron A. Petrie
The start and end of the urban phase of the Indus civilization (IC; c. 2500 to 1900 BC) are often linked with climate change, specifically regarding trends in the intensity of summer and winter precipitation and its effect on the productivity of local food economies. The Indus Village is a modular agent-based model designed as a heuristic “sandbox” to investigate how IC farmers could cope with diverse and changing environments and how climate change could impact the local and regional food production levels required for maintaining urban centers. The complete model includes dedicated submodels about weather, topography, soil properties, crop dynamics, food storage and exchange, nutrition, demography, and farming decision-making. In this paper, however, we focus on presenting the parts required for generating crop dynamics, including the submodels involved (weather, soil water, land, and crop models) and how they are combined progressively to form two integrated models (land water and land crop models). Furthermore, we describe and discuss the results of six simulation experiments, which highlight the roles of seasonality, topography, and crop diversity in understanding the potential impact of environmental variability, including climate change, in IC food economies. We conclude by discussing a broader consideration of risk and risk mitigation strategies in ancient agriculture and potential implications to the sustainability of the IC urban centres. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.