Distinguished Lecture | The third East-West Road in the Old World: Early crop and livestock dispersal across the Tibetan Plateau

Each quarter, the Stanford Archaeology Center invites prominent archaeologists from around the globe to be in residence for a week as a Distinguished Lecturer. During their residency, the Distinguished Lecturer gives two lectures and interacts with faculty, postdoctoral scholars and students. Stanford Archaeology Center will host Prof. Xiaoyan Yang  Lanzhou University over two days (Oct 7 and Oct 8 for the Fall Quarter of this academic year. 

Abstract:
The spread of prehistoric crops and livestock across the Eurasian continent significantly transformed regional production systems and lifestyles, exerting a profound impact on the development of human societies. It is widely accepted that the westward expansion of East Asian domesticates, alongside the eastward spread of West Asian domesticates, followed the Eurasian “Steppe Road” or the “Oasis Road” via Central Asia, Xinjiang, and the Hexi Corridor. The Tibetan Plateau is often considered an obstacle to crops and livestock because of its extremely high-altitude environment, and the proposed transmission route usually bypasses the plateau. Our recent studies have provided new evidence for the transregional spread of prehistoric domesticates and have proposed the “Plateau Road,” along which East Asian domesticated crops (two millets and japonica rice) spread outward, while West Asian domesticated barley, wheat, cattle, goat and sheep, as well as South Asian indica rice, spread to East Asia through bidirectional trans-Himalayan exchanges. The development of the Plateau Road for domesticates was fundamentally rooted in local agricultural practices and exchange networks. The sequential emergence of millet and barley–wheat agriculture triggered two significant waves of human exploitation of the high-elevation regions.