Event

The lessons from archaeology are critical in allowing us to situate our current climate crisis in context. Using an example from China and Southeast Asia, this talk will illustrate both how our current climate crisis differs in scale and amplitude from anything humanity has known. Asian rice (Oryza sativa) is a staple food for over half of the world’s population and one fifth of the world’s population rely on this crop as a primary source of livelihood. In this talk, I will examine the role that climate played in the spread of rice following its domestication into both northern Asia and Southeast Asia. I will describe the genetic adaptations that O. sativa has made to changes in climate over the course of its domestication and will explain how and why the current climate crisis differs from anything that this cultivar (and the humans who cultivate it) have ever experienced.

Jade d’Alpoim Guedes is an Associate professor of Anthropology and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California, San Diego. She is a environmental archaeologist and computational modeller who studies how humans adapted their foraging practices and agricultural strategies to new environments. Jade earned her PhD at Harvard University in 2013 and carried out a postdoctoral fellowship in Earth Planetary Science where she developed computational models that charted the spread of agriculture to Southwest China and the Tibetan Plateau. She directs the paleoethnobotany laboratory at UCSD where she has analyzed material from a wide variety of contexts across China, Southeast Asia, Harappa and the Pacific Northwest. She currently directs an NSF funded interdisciplinary fieldwork project in the Jiuzhaigou National Park, Sichuan Province, China that uses a combination of computational modeling, ancient climate reconstruction and geomorphology to chart how humans adapted their lifestyles to the challenging environment of the foothills of the Himalayas. This project also involves experimental research and field trials of crop landraces aimed at improving the models used to understand ancient crop distribution and their resistance to climate change.