Agenda

Feeding the Third Pole: Multidisciplinary Insights into Local Adaptations to the Agropastoral Transition in the Tibetan Highlands
Department Conference Room, San Sebastiano, 11AM CEST
This event is part of Environments, Societies and Histories of East Asia series. 

The Tibetan Plateau, referred to as the “roof of the world” or the “third pole”, has an average elevation of more than 4000 masl. The combination of high-altitude, cold, and arid climate, hypoxic atmosphere, extreme weather events, and fragile ecosystems makes the plateau one of the most challenging regions that our species has ever permanently settled. Despite these environmental constraints, Homo sapiens seemingly engaged in temporary excursions onto the Tibetan Plateau at altitudes above 4500 masl by ~40,000−30,000 years ago. The appearance of sporadic ‘villages’ clearly shows permanent settlement of the interior plateau in certain ecologically-rich pockets by ~5000 BP. The transition to a novel agropastoral system, based on Western Eurasian domesticates such as barley, wheat, sheep, goat, and cattle, along with yak, after 3500 years ago marked a turning point in Tibetan prehistory, which fundamentally reshaped society and ecology. However, due to the fragmentary data, previous research on this agropastoral transition has been limited either to proposing broad subsistence adaptions, or to piecing together a uniform temporal shift in crop and fauna use. It remains unclear how ancient Tibetans living in different subregions responded to the new agropastoral lifeways. In this talk, Li Tang synthesizes new multiproxy datasets generated by my research with other recently published data from over 70 sites to reconstruct high-altitude food production and consumption adaptations on a subregional scale. New results allow her to systematically map out the local dietary adaptations within four subregions of the interior plateau, challenging the existing uniform subsistence models for Tibet and shedding light on the complexity of human responses to different high-altitude landscapes.

Li Tang 
As a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and Sichuan University Li Tang’s research focuses on the use of plant and animal resources by ancient Tibetans who lived on the high altitude plateau. She is especially interested in exploring how early agriculture appear and developed in Tibet, how ancient herders used the landscape for pastoralism, and how secondary animal products (dairy and dung) may have been exploited.

Zoom
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