Place · neolithic settlement · India
Lahuradewa
Also known as Lahuradewa, Lahuradeva, Sant Kabir Nagar
A lakeside settlement in Sant Kabir Nagar district in the middle Ganges plain, whose lowest levels have produced rice grains and pottery with claimed dates in the seventh millennium BCE — which would make rice cultivation in the Ganges valley as early as anywhere in the world.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered
- Location
- 26.770, 82.950 (approximate)
Worth knowing
Whether the earliest rice here is cultivated or gathered wild is the crux, and the answer changes whether the Ganges plain is an independent centre of rice domestication or a recipient from China. The site is a small mound beside an oxbow lake, and its excavation reports are its whole literature.
The early radiocarbon dates (c.6400 BCE for rice at Lahuradewa) and the domesticated status of that earliest rice are both disputed. Wild Oryza rufipogon grows in the surrounding ox-bow lakes, and gathering is hard to distinguish from cultivation in the archaeological record; several specialists outside the project read the Lahuradewa rice grains as morphologically wild rather than cultivated and the dates as too early for the Indian centre of rice domestication.
Connections (2)
- Site adjacencyAlamgirpur
Alamgirpur is the eastern limit of the Harappan spread and Lahuradewa lies four hundred kilometres further east in the middle Ganges plain, with rice and pottery claimed for the seventh millennium BCE. The two together mean the Ganges valley was not empty land waiting to be settled from the Indus: it had its own long neolithic before the cities in the west existed.
- AnalogueMehrgarh
Mehrgarh has wheat and barley from the seventh millennium BCE at the mouth of the Bolan pass; Lahuradewa has rice, claimed from about the same period, twelve hundred kilometres east in the Ganges plain. If both stand, the subcontinent had two independent agricultural beginnings on different crops, and the Ganges valley was not a frontier waiting to be settled from the west.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Lahuradewa”. Rakesh Tewari and others, excavation reports in Prāgdhārā (2002–08); Dorian Fuller on South Asian rice domestication.
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