Cornell University's East Asia Program, Southeast Asia Program,
and Department of Linguistics present:

RICE AND LANGUAGE ACROSS ASIA:
CROPS, MOVEMENT, AND SOCIAL CHANGE



Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
September 22-25, 2011

The goal of our symposium was to examine the relationship between the beginnings and spread of rice agriculture and cultural and linguistic developments of early Asian societies. The timing of the symposium was motivated by rapid advances in the fields of language reconstruction and subgrouping, human and plant genetics, archaeobotany, and related subfields of archaeological research. The symposium focused on the complex relationship between crops, language, and socio-cultural developments in early South, Southeast, and East Asia. We paid special attention to the role of rice as a dominant crop in early agricultural transformations and expansions across Asia, and to how human populations were impacted and societies changed as a result of the introduction and development of rice farming. A focal question of the symposium was the relationship between the distribution of major language families and their subgroups in Asia, and the spread of rice cultivation, examined in relation to theoretical issues such as the conceptions of “language family” and “population” across disciplines.