Grain Size Across the Finite Frontier of Asia

Session: 
Archaeobotany
Author(s): 
Gillreath-Brown
, Andrew - Washington State University
d'Alpoim Guedes
, Jade - Washington State University

Wheat and barley spread across Asia as part of the ‘Neolithic package.’ Recently, researchers have focused on individual items in the package such as wheat and barley to understand the timing and routes of the spread. Since speciation is gradual, changes among wheat and barley should be present in the archaeological record. Further, barley can successfully adapt to new environments through variants of genes. In this paper, we evaluate changes in wheat and barley ranging from Pakistan to the southeastern Tibetan Plateau and approximately 3300 BC – 1030 AD. Previous work has shown that wheat size changed across Asia. Our work focuses primarily on different sites with barley and explores changes in size across latitude and longitude. We use measurement data and niche modeling to better understand the effects that the movement into different cultural and physical environments had on the shape and size of wheat and barley.