Agriculture clearly plays a fundamental role in our lives today, from being the only means of sustaining the world's human populations to underpinning New Zealand's economy.
What set humans off on this spiral of food production and population growth? Was the development of the ability to control food production ‘a good thing'? Did it improve quality of life or simply allow more people to survive?
Existing research on this topic, based on evidence from North America and Europe, has suggested that early agriculturalists were not as healthy as their foraging (hunting/gathering) ancestors.
What about the effects of agriculture in the rice-growing regions of Asia?
These were powerful, complex societies when the Europeans and Native Americans still had relatively simple village economies. Did rice-based agriculture contribute to their initial success by providing them not only with a reliable food supply, but also a relatively healthy one?
Members of the Bioarchaeology Research Group in the Department of Anatomy and Structural Biology, Otago School of Medical Sciences, have been involved in a multidisciplinary, international archaeological excavation project in Southeast Asia that is providing the opportunity to address these questions.
The site, Ban Non Wat, is in Thailand and includes a cemetery that has yielded over 600 burials dating from 3700 to 1700 years ago (1700BC to 300AD).
The project is now in the post-excavation phase, where the evidence from the site is being processed and interpreted.
The bioarchaeological team on this project, led by Dr Nancy Tayles and Dr Sian Halcrow, has the fascinating task of studying the human skeletal remains from the burials.
The first step is always to establish who each individual was by estimating their age at death and, for adults, their sex.
For this we use the same techniques as forensic scientists, although we can, sadly, never know the names of the people represented.
Once we have this census we can begin to research their quality of life using indicators such as mortality and growth of infants and children, disease, and patterns of physical activity to see how this changed over time as they became more proficient rice agriculturalists.
This is just one aspect of our research; for example, Dr Halcrow is about to embark on the hunt for DNA in the bones to see if we can identify how they were related to one another (kinship).
For more information
Dr Nancy Tayles or Dr Sian Halcrow
Department of Anatomy & Structural Biology
University of Otago
PO Box 913
Dunedin