Over the course of the Holocene, populations of South Asia overwhelmingly shifted from hunting-and-gathering to farming but followed several distinctive regional trajectories in the northwestern, northern, western and southern parts of the region (Fig. 1.24.1). In recent years, archaeological research, combined with better botanical documentation of crop-wild progenitors in South Asia, has provided a basis for postulating independent domestication events in several parts of South Asia. Local domestication events combined with agricultural dispersals in an interconnected mosaic of the origins of cultivation, pastoralism and sedentism in South Asia (Fuller 2006). Current evidence is clearest for the emergence of sedentary village societies that were invariably already dependent on cultivation and usually included domesticated crops and livestock. This suggests that in several regions, especially in the South Deccan, Gujarat and the Ganges Plains, the beginnings of food production occurred among seasonally mobile societies that have proved harder to identify archaeologically. The most important external inputs came from the Near East via the Iranian Plateau starting as early as nine thousand years ago (Meadow 1996), while some inputs from East Asia appear to have added to the agricultural diversity of South Asia only in the past four thousand years and entered from the northwest via Central Asia (Fuller & Qin 2009).

The environmental opportunities of the region are laid out by the seasonality and trajectory of the summer monsoons that sweep from southwest to northeast across the peninsula and turn westwards along the Himlayan foothills (Map 1.24.3). In so doing, they curve around the dryness of the Thar Desert, which separates most of the Indus Valley from reliable summer monsoons. West of the Indus, the Indo-Iranian borderlands provide expanses of semi-arid steppe, open woodland and semidesert that cannot support sedentary population in the absence of artificial irrigation and favour mobile pastoral specialisations.