Cornell hosts 'Rice and Language Across Asia' symposium

Archaeologists, geneticists and linguists from across Asia, Australia, Europe and North America will gather at Cornell Sept. 22-25 in the ILR Conference Center, for the international symposium, "Rice and Language Across Asia: Crops, Movement and Social Change International Symposium." Participants will examine and discuss the complex relationship between crops, language and socio-cultural developments in early Southeast Asia.

The timing of the symposium is motivated by rapid advances in the fields of human and plant genetics, language reconstruction, archaeobotany and related subfields of archaeological research.

The symposium will focus on how human populations were affected and societies changed as a result of the introduction and development of rice farming. The distribution of major language families and the spread of rice cultivation will be examined in relation to theoretical issues such as language family and population across disciplines.

The event is free and open to the public, but preregistration is required. To register or for information, visit: http://conf.ling.cornell.edu/riceandlanguage.

The symposium is hosted by Cornell's East Asia Program, Southeast Asia Program and Department of Linguistics, with support from the College of Arts and Sciences, Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, Institute for the Social Sciences, Lehman Fund for Scholarly Exchange with China and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, with additional support from the Departments of Anthropology, Asian Studies and Classics.

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