EARLY FARMING COMMUNITIES IN CHINA

The transition to Neolithic life in China was achieved under much more favorable climatic conditions when the average annual temperature in North China was 3–4 °C higher than the present-day temperature and the lakes on average were some 4.5 m above today’s level. Interestingly in China the three critical inventions that made Neolithic life possible – agriculture, the manufacture of pottery  are, and sedentary life – seem to have taken place in more or less the same period of time, being different from some other regions such as Mesopotamia where agriculture and sedentary life appeared around 10,000 BP, predating pottery-making by some two millennia.

It is now widely accepted that farming began in North China roughly concomitant with the rise of the Cishan–Peiligang culture in eastern Henan and southern Hebei with sites dated mostly between 6500 and 5000 BC.10 Earlier signs of Neolithic culture were found in 1987 at a site in Hebei Province which yielded a few primitive pottery shards mixed with stone tools; the carbon-14 samples derived from the site have been dated to 10,815–9,700 BP, being the earliest of Neolithic culture in North China.11 Possibly even earlier, at Emaokou in northern Shanxi, a stone-tool workshop site was found, dating probably to the transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic period; it yielded regularly shaped stone hoes and sickles, indicating the possibility of agriculture at that time. But scholars have not agreed on how to fit assemblage into the general chain of evolution before the coming of the firmly established agricultural economy.

The settlements of the Cishan–Peiligang culture are normally small, measuring about 1–2 ha, never exceeding 6 ha, with features such as simple subterranean dwelling structures and storage pits. Pottery types are simple and three-legged bowls and jars are common, fired at a relatively high temperature; surface treatments are rare but may feature loose card impressions. At the Cishan site in Hebei, 80 of the 120 ash pits yielded remains of grain and the charcoal samples were determined to have beenmillet. At the Peiligang site in Henan, charcoal samples of millet were also excavated. By now, some twenty sites contemporary with Cishan–Peiligang have been identified in the Yellow River regions from Shaanxi in the west to Shandong in the east, many being considered “fountainheads” of the “regional” cultures that prospered thereafter according to the “multi-region” theory, and many have yielded charcoal grain samples. These findings suggest that the Cishan–Peiligang culture represents a widely existing first stage of cultural development in Yellow River valley. They also suggest that farming and sedentary life had already become widespread in North China in the seventh to sixth millennia BC and that millet was the staple crop under cultivation by early communities of village-dwellers. A recently reported site is Jiahu in southern Henan, measuring 5.5 ha and belonging to the millet-farming Cishan–Peiligang culture. However, in a chunk of burnt earth, impressions of ten grains of rice were discovered, securely dated to 6500–5500 BC. The discovery revealed an alternative food strategy available to the Cishan–Peiligang communities, but it also raises the question about the region where rice was first domesticated. At the same site, archaeologists also discovered the earliest tortoiseshell most likely used for divination purposes, inscribed with two insolated graphs.

It had been thought for a long time that rice was domesticated and cultivated first in South China, centering on certain sites located near the Hangzhou Bay, dating around 5000 BC (roughly contemporary to the Yangshao culture in the north), and easily predating South Asia, the other center for rice cultivation in the ancient world, by at least 2,000 years. It took at least the same length of time for the rice agriculture that originated in South China to reach the Korean Peninsula in the north and Southeast Asia in the south. However, recent discoveries have pushed the date of rice domestication far back by at least two millennia, pointing to the inland basins along the Yangzi River. In two early Neolithic sites in Hunan Province, carbon-14 dated to 7500–6100 BC, charcoal remains of rice have been found either in pottery bodies, or in a large quantity of as many as 15,000 grains in a section of a moat surrounding what was probably the earliest defense wall in China.12 Further research has even detected a transitional stage from an economy possibly dependent on the gathering of wild rice to an economy based on the production of domesticated rice – at the site of Diaotonghuan in Jiangxi Province, wild rice was gathered in the early period and domesticated rice was found in the later period, thus fixing this epic-making moment in human history at around 10,000 BC.

In recent years, archaeologists have also made efforts to understand the process by which pottery-making technology was invented in China. In the excavation of the cave site at Zengpiyan in Guangxi, archaeologists were able to define a sequence of strata in which early pottery remains were identified. From the period I stratum, dated to 12,000–11,000 BP, were found a few coarsely made and thick shards, fired at a low temperature. From period II, dated to 11,000–10,000 BP (c. 9100–8000 BC) pottery shards were found that were much better made, their surfaces decorated with patterns, and fired at a higher temperature. Although the subsistence pattern of the Zengpiyan society was likely to have been based on fishing and gathering, the findings offer good lessons as to how pottery-making was developed from its infancy, perhaps in a stage even earlier than in North China.

NOTES

10 In archaeology, the name of a non-literate culture is usually derived from the site where its remains were first identified. But sometimes variations do occur when a culture is renamed after its most representative, and usually most prominent site.

11 This is the Nanzhuangtou site in Hebei. The carbon-14 dating method was developed by Willard F. Libby in 1946 at the University of Chicago. Carbon-14 is one of the carbon isotopes. It exists in all living organisms at an even level and decreases at a constant rate (half of the amount of the radioisotope at any given time will be lost in the succeeding 5,730 years) after the organism dies. By measuring the amount of carbon-14 that still remains, the age of the organism can be determined. Carbon-14 dating was introduced to China in the 1960s, and is now widely used in Chinese archaeology.

12 Gray W. Crawford, “East Asian Plant Domestication,” in Miriam T. Stark (ed.), Archaeology of Asia (Malden: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 83–84.

By Li Feng in "Early China - A Docial and Cultural History", Cambridge University Press, UK, 2013, excerpts pp.22-25. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa. 

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