The Archaeology of Early Agriculture in China

Were rice and the millets domesticated within one cultural system, or separately? Rice is present in large quantities by soon after 7000 BC in the Peiligang culture site of Jiahu in the Huai valley, Henan Province, this being a site with a material culture that falls within the Yellow River millet-based tradition (Zhang and Wang 1998; Lu 1998a; Chen 1999). Thus, there is clear overlap in the distributions of the two sets of cereals. Two completely separate origins of agriculture in China are counterindicated by this pattern. A single center, albeit large and diffuse, seems far more likely (Cohen 2003).

Turning now to the early Neolithic archaeological record, non-readers of Chinese luckily have the masterly 1986 summary of the situation by the late K. C. Chang (Chang Kwang-chih), now a little out of date but still very thorough in its presentation. In the first two editions of this book (1963 and 1968), Chang presented his view that the southern and eastern Chinese Neolithic developed as a result of "Lungshanoid" diffusion from a Yangshao / Longshan agricultural and Neolithic heartland in the North China plain (the Zhongyuan), located around the junctions of the Yellow, Wei, and Fen rivers, where the oldest millet-bearing sites occur. At that time, before the early Yangzi rice-bearing sites were discovered, a Zhongyuan cultural origin was postulated for the whole Chinese Neolithic, and the Lungshanoid was perceived in terms of a secondary dispersal of populations with rice cultivation, stone adzes, and reaping knives, and a set of specific pottery forms (including tripod vessels) to as far south as Guangdong.

By the time of Chang's third edition (1977), archaeology was entering an antidiffusionist and anti-historical phase. Chang was now beginning to regard the Lungshanoid more as a result of interaction than of diffusion or population dispersal from a heartland region. The most recent fourth edition (1986) maintains this view, wherein the Lungshanoid is seen purely as a convergence phenomenon between an array of later Neolithic cultures located across southern and eastern China during the fourth millennium BC. Interestingly, however, there are hints in a 1996 paper that Chang might have been returning

to almost his original views just prior to his death in 2001, owing to the new Yangzi early rice discoveries, since he was suggesting that the Neolithic cultures of southern China and Taiwan could have had a Yangzi origin linked to an actual population dispersal (Chang and Goodenough 1996). By this time, the concept of central China as a large region of early agriculture involving both rice and millets, rather than merely a Yellow River (Yangshao) source with millets only in the first instance, was rapidly becoming more widely accepted.

I have to state at the outset that I believe Chang was generally correct in his early interpretations in the 1960s, even if some of the Yangzi early rice details were still unimagined at that time. I suspect also that we were both in accord in our views during the late 1990s, since I had many occasions to talk with him during visits to Taipei in connection with my research on Austronesian origins. The reason why Late Neolithic China became such a cozy club of cultural interaction at about 3500 ac is because the cultures concerned were already culturally and historically closely related, and probably shared an ultimate common regional origin at the beginning of the Neolithic, at 6500 BC or before. This does not mean that the Chinese Neolithic evolved from one small ancestral society, but it does mean that it evolved within a region characterized by a high degree of communication and interaction, perhaps focused on a chain of quite closely related ethnolinguistic populations.

The Archaeological Record of the Early

Neolithic in the Yellow and

Yangzi Basins

The archaeological record of the Yellow River points toward an oldest appearance of the Neolithic at about 6500 BC, amongst a group of sites located along the eastern foothills of the highlands that form the western edge of the North China Plain. Other sites were perhaps also located around the edge of the Shandong highlands, at that time either an island or linked to the mainland by swamps and marshes. Annual temperatures at this time were 2-4°C above the present and summer growing-season rainfall might have been a little higher than now. The loess soils of the Yellow valley were capable of supporting permanent agriculture when sufficient moisture was present; loess also has a self-fertilizing propensity, bringing up mineral nutrients by capillary action. Under such conditions, according to Ho (1975), millet agriculture could have supported at least 400 people per square kilometer on a fairly permanent basis.

The oldest Yellow River Neolithic sites formed a continuum with four internal clusters, two centered respectively around the major sites of Cishan and Peiligang (Figure 6.3), with two smaller groups in the Wei and upper Han valleys. Related but slightly later sites occurred as far west as eastern Gansu (Dadiwan culture), and as far east as Shandong (Houli and Beixin cultures). All the sites of the core region centered around Cishan and Peiligang date between 6500 and 5000 sc. They usually cover between one and two hectares, and they often occur at high densities (e.g., 54 Peiligang-type sites, all under 6 hectares, in an area of 17 by 20 kilometers in central Henan, according to Li Liu 1996:267). Houses were round or square with sunken floors, interspersed with storage pits. Over 300 such pits occurred at Cishan, 80 with millet remains, with a total millet storage capacity estimated for the site of about 100,000 kilograms of grain (Yan 1992). Polished stone axes and serrated stone or shell reaping knives, plus pestles and mortars with four short legs, all attest to an agricultural economy, combined with the keeping of pigs, dogs, and chickens and the collection of considerable quantities of nuts (walnuts, hazelnuts, and

Celtis seeds). Some sites have cemeteries of extended burials, reinforcing the obvious hints of large and densely concentrated populations.

The pottery of these northern cultures is remarkably alike, and includes simple forms of cord-marked, combed, fingertip-impressed, or incised vessels (even some painted), often on tripods or pedestals. While there are minor cultural differences over the large area represented by these sites, given the overall homogeneity of pattern it is not too hard to visualize a common ancestral form of culture, located quite close in time, from which all these descendant cultures of the Yellow River Basin originated.

Southerly sites of this group, for instance Lijiacun in the upper Han Valley, often contain small quantities of rice as well as millet (Wu 1996). Jiahu in Henan, a Huai basin site with a material culture very close to that of the Peiligang culture, is especially important, as already noted, because it actually appears to have had a rice-based economy. Dated to between 7000 and 5800 BC, Jiahu possibly covered 5.5 hectares, with sunken floored houses in Peiligang style, a cemetery, pottery kilns, and a Peiligang polished stone industry including axes, reaping knives, and typical Peiligang stone mortars on four low legs. The site also has evidence for domesticated pig, dog, and (claimed) cattle; for rice-tempered, cord-marked, and sometimes red-slipped pottery (with some possible sign precursors for later Chinese writing); and quantities of rice husks, grains, and phytoliths (Zhang and Wang 1998; Li et al. 2003). Some of the pottery resembles that from Pengtoushan, a rice-based site in the middle Yangzi Basin, to which we turn below. This is of course extremely significant - Jiahu has two faces, one facing north, one south. It renders untenable the idea that the millets and rice were domesticated by separate communities living in splendid isolation.

It is, of course, the recent discoveries located in the lakelands to the immediate south of the middle Yangzi Valley that have revolutionized our understanding of Neolithic China. The one-hectare site of Pengtoushan near the shoreline of Lake Dongting was founded around 7000 BC, perhaps slightly earlier than any of the milletbased sites of the Yellow River, although the available chronologies still lack the refinement to make this certain (Hunan 1990; Yan 1991). Its layers, 3 to 4 meters thick, contain traces of sand-floored houses, cord-marked and red-slipped pottery with rice-husk tempers, and fairly simple flaked lithics. Reaping knives and mortars of the Peiligang type are

absent, the latter perhaps because rice was normally boiled in pots and eaten as a whole-grain food rather than ground into flour (Fujimoto 1983).

Another rice-bearing site at Bashidang, located about 25 kilometers north of Pengtoushan, covered 3 hectares and contained a mixture of houses with sunken floors, ground-level floors, and even pile constructions, together with a starfishshaped earthen ceremonial platform and a defensive ditch (Hunan 1996; Chen 1999; Yasuda 2000). Bashidang also belongs to the Pengtoushan culture (7000 to 5500 Bc), and is stated to contain wooden spade blades and unspecified tools of bone, wood, and bamboo. Chen Xingcan (1999) notes the presence of pottery features found also in the Peiligang culture and in Jiahu. Bashidang has yielded bones of possibly domesticated pigs, dogs, chicken, and cattle, and prolific rice remains (over 15,000 grains).

Presumably, the rice eaten in these early Neolithic sites in the middle Yangzi was grown in wet swampy fields of some kind, close to lakes and river banks. Water caltrop and lotus roots were also grown, like rice both water-loving plants. Although no fields have survived from early Neolithic times, new discoveries at Chengtoushan and Caoxieshan, near Pengtoushan, have yielded remains of small bunded rice fields dating from about 4500-3000 Bc, these being so far the oldest actual rice field remains discovered in China (He 1999).

According to Yan Wenming (1992), the majority of the earliest rice-yielding sites known in China are located in the middle and lower Yangzi Basin. Here, we undoubtedly have at least one origin region for rice cultivation, perhaps the only one. The "heartland" of East Asian agriculture, extending from the Yangzi to the Yellow rivers and incorporating the Pengtoushan and Peiligang/Jiahu foci for both rice and the millets, has given rise to the dispersal of the ancestors of almost half of the world's modern population.