A Song of Rice and Fire: The Ashline, Feedback Loops, and the Recursive Enclosure of Rice

This paper reconceptualizes the domestication of Oryza sativa through the lens of recursive enclosure and network-critical evolution, where feedback loops between fire management, human cognition, and plant adaptation crossed critical thresholds to establish novel evolutionary dynamics. Challenging hydraulic-state orthodoxy, I argue that domestication emerged not through discrete human control but via phase transitions within fire-maintained ecotones operating on 3-7 year cycles. Through archaeobotanical and genomic evidence, I demonstrate that upland swidden systems created recursive attractors - ecological and cognitive feedback loops in which rice and humans co-adapted through repeated burning (t), systematic return (t+1), and selective harvesting (t+2). Fire functioned simultaneously as ecological reset mechanism and prosthetic memory system, compressing successional cycles while entraining selection pressures across multiple plant generations. These early disturbance regimes structured not only rice biology but the cognitive infrastructure enabling subsequent agricultural intensification. I propose that domestication represents a distributed phase shift in socio-ecological networks - a recursive enclosure operating at the ashline where repetitive human-fire interactions established the conditions for coevolutionary change without requiring conscious breeding programs.