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Taro (Colocasia esculenta) in Asia and the Pacific: Models for Domestication as a Food and Fodder Crop

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Global Ecology in Historical Perspective

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Abstract

Tropical and temperate forms of cultivated taro (Colocasia esculenta) may have originated in lowland and mountain regions of Southeast Asia. In the nineteenth century, botanical exploration in Northeast India led to early suggestions that cultivated taro originated there. This and later theories regarding the domestication of taro have been based on circumstantial botanical, linguistic, and archaeological evidence, with little regard for diversity in wild populations and little regard for how such populations disperse and are used as food and fodder sources. Here I review recent field observations and suggest new models for the domestication of taro as a multipurpose crop.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by JSPS Kakenhi projects 17H01682 (Tsukuba University, Japan) and 17H04614 (National Museum of Ethnology, Japan). Sincere thanks also to all my colleagues, local informants, and guides, in many countries.

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  1. National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, 565-8511, Japan

    Peter J. Matthews

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Correspondence to Peter J. Matthews .

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  1. National Museum of Ethnology, Suita, Osaka, Japan

    Kazunobu Ikeya

  2. Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USA

    William Balée

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Matthews, P.J. (2023). Taro (Colocasia esculenta) in Asia and the Pacific: Models for Domestication as a Food and Fodder Crop. In: Ikeya, K., Balée, W. (eds) Global Ecology in Historical Perspective. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-6557-9_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-6557-9_11

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