People's Republic of China (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
301-325 (710 Records)
Water plays an undeniable role in the constitution of politics and society, presenting an elemental force to be controlled for the expansion of agrarian economies. The political life line linked with water is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than with the Han Empire whose massive canalization and irrigation works were necessary to facilitate state expansion into deserts and tropics. The archaeological focus on water and agrarian infrastructure has however overlooked other capacities of water,...
How Was Iron Weaponry Obtained by Local Elite during Japan’s Kofun Period? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Kofun period of Japan, stretching from the mid-3rd century to the late-6th century AD, witnessed the formation of an almost archipelago-wide sociopolitical consolidation centered on the paramount elites of the Nara Basin. Considered by many scholars to have been an early state, this Yamato polity exercised unprecedented control over the production,...
How Were Stones Used in a Bronze Age Society? A Case in the Middle Yangtze River (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Resources and Society in Ancient China" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Numerous previous archaeological discoveries and studies have shown that rulers from the Central Plains during the Shang Dynasty (ca. 1600–1050 BC) were motivated to systematically construct settlements and operate in the Jianghan Area of the Middle Yangtze River drainage at least in part in order to control metal resources in the middle and lower...
Human activity accelerating the rapid desertification of the Mu Us Sandy Lands, North China-Evidence from Micro-charcoal Assemblages (2017)
Over the past several thousand years, the arid and semiarid regions of China have experienced a series of asynchronous desertification events in its semiarid sandy and desert areas, but the precise identification of the driving forces of such events has remained elusive. Identified are two rapid desertification events (RDEs) at ~4.6 ± 0.2 ka BP and ~3.3 ± 0.2 ka BP from the JJ Profile, located in the eastern Mu Us Sandy Lands. These RDEs appear to have occurred immediately following periods...
Human Adaptation and Natural Resource Usage in Prehistoric Southern Ryukyu islands, Southwestern Japan (2017)
This study aims to discuss about the strategy of prehistoric human adaptation to the island environment, especially focus on the natural resource usage. I introduce the case of southern part of Ryukyu islands—the southwestern part of Japan archipelago, where the first long-term human settlement had occurred about 4,300 years ago. Prehistoric people in southern Ryukyu islands had a unique material culture (absence of pottery, use of giant clam shell adzes), which was dissimilar to the surrounding...
Human Behavior or Environmental Change: Zooarchaeological Research on Shell Midden Sites at Guanglu Island, China (2019)
This is an abstract from the "New Thoughts on Current Research in East Asian Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The zooarchaeological research on Xiaozhushan, Menhou and Wujiacun shell midden sites, which are located in Guanglu island, provides empirical materials to understand the transformation of animal resources acquisition patterns from fishing-hunting economy to livestock way. This paper analyses the reasons for the appearance of...
Human occupation during the penultimate glaciation in China’s Western Loess Plateau: The technological evolution and adaptive variability of the Yanghsang (2017)
The newly excavated Yangshang site generated a high-resolution record in China's Western Loess Plateau which demonstrated that ancient humans occupied this region since MIS-7. Nearly 1700 stone artifacts and more than 330 animal remains were unearthed in 2013. Although the site was dominated by the quartz based core/flake tradition, same as most lower Paleolithic sites in Northern China, the core reduction analysis and raw material economic study among the long term cultural sediments indicate...
Hunters in transition: Mesolithic societies of temperate Eurasia and their transition to farming (1986)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the EXARC Bibliography, originally compiled by Roeland Paardekooper, and updated. Most of these records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us using the...
Hunting Activities of Upper Paleolithic Humans in the Japanese Archipelago (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Much of the Japanese archipelago is covered with layers of acidic loam originating from volcanic eruptions. For this reason, there are very few Paleolithic sites that contain well-preserved faunal remains. In fact, there are only six known sites on the four main islands of Japan (Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu Islands) which have seen the excavation of...
Hunting vs. Herding: The Eastern and Central Tibetan Plateau’s Earliest Inhabitants (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Tangible Things to Intangible Ideas: The Context of Pan-Eurasian Exchange of Crops and Objects" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our understanding of when and how humans settled high altitude (>3000 m.a.s.l.) regions of the Tibetan Plateau has been greatly extended in the past decade. In this paper, we shift the focus from plants to animal resources, and explore the diversity of animal-based subsistence strategies...
Hunting with talc? Experiments into the functionality of certain Late Neolithic ground projectile points from the site of Liangchengzhen, Peoples Republic of China (2009)
Collaborative excavations by the Shandong University and Field Museum at the Longshan Period site of Liangchengzhen in eastern Shandong Province, China have uncovered over 200 projectile points constructed from several prevalent material types of varying hardness. The majority of the points were finished by grinding. The smaller percentage were finished by pressure flaking. Raw materials utilized in projectile point manufacture included chlorite schist, chert and talc schist. To better...
Ideas of Immortality and the Clay Buddha Image from Yibin, Sichuan, China (2017)
In 2012, the Sichuan Provincial Institute of Archaeology excavated a group of cliff tombs in Nanxi County, Yibin; grave M12 at this site revealed a clay Buddha image. This paper argues that this is the base of an object dating between the late Eastern Han and the Shu Han period (AD 25-263) that is similar to the bases of money trees molded in the shape of a seated Buddha or Queen Mother of the West. The image thus likely developed from the image of the Queen Mother of the West as seen at the...
Identification of Adhesive on Bone-Handled Microblades from the Houtaomuga Site in Northeast China (2017)
With the emergence and development of composite tools in the Upper Paleolithic, adhesives became one of the most widely used materials by early human societies. Of particular interest is to know which animal/plant species were being exploited for glue manufacturing. The Houtaomuga site, located in northeast China, provides favorable materials for the identification of organic residues; and a few bone-handled microblades were collected from this site. In this study, we scraped micro adhesive...
Identification of Adhesive on Bone-Handled Microblades from the Houtaomuga Site in Northeast China (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With the emergence and progress of composite tools in the Upper Paleolithic, the adhesive became one of the most widely used materials by early human societies. However, the precise composition identification of adhesive in archaeological remains is a real analytical challenge, because the adhesive mainly consists of organic materials that are susceptible to...
Identification of Turquoises from Different Mining Areas using Lead and Strontium Isotope Composition (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Tangible Things to Intangible Ideas: The Context of Pan-Eurasian Exchange of Crops and Objects" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Hekou Turquoise Mining Site in Shaanxi Province can provide significant clues to the provenance of turquoise in early China. In this study, we analyzed turquoise ore samples from other turquoise mines near Hekou Mining Site in eastern Qinling Mountains and established an origin...
Identifying Animal Management Strategies in Pre-domestication Contexts (2023)
This is an abstract from the "From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The concept of domestication highlights a form of human intervention in animal reproduction that is at the extreme in a continuum of human-animal relations. Despite the extreme nature of this category of interaction, domestication remains difficult to distinguish archaeologically and...
Identifying the "Why" Of Ancient Engineering Choices: Materials Performance and the Production of Ceramic Bronze-Casting Molds in Zhou-Period China (2018)
Bronze ritual vessels from Shang- and Zhou-period China display a combination of features—complex, three-dimensional forms; exquisitely fine surface detail; and monumental size—that was achieved by casting in multi-part ceramic molds. The ceramic material used to form these casting molds is soft, powdery, and silica rich, making it altogether different from pottery clays in both its physical qualities and its production sequence. Why was such a material chosen? Which specific materials...
Identifying the Gaps: Prospects and Limitations of Using Pottery Collections As Archaeobotanical Data in Korea’s Neolithic (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Neolithic (ca. 6000–1500 BCE) is a formative period of Korea’s prehistory that sees the beginning of plant cultivation. Although archaeobotanical research on Korea’s Neolithic began more than two decades ago, rapid development coupled with an almost total reliance on rushed rescue excavations has resulted in major...
In brief (2005)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the EXARC Bibliography, originally compiled by Roeland Paardekooper, and updated. Most of these records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us using the...
In Transition: The Collections and Veterans of the VCP (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Pre-Recorded Video Presentation Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Veterans Curation Program (VCP) is both a temporary employment program for veterans and an interim repository for archaeological collections while they undergo rehabilitation. During each session, veteran technicians help care for at-risk artifact and associated archival collections from the U....
Incipient Metallurgy in Western Yunnan: current study and issues (2017)
This work discusses results from current studies and issues on the production and use of early Yunnan metals, as well as possible interaction between western Yunnan sites and their counterparts in surrounding regions. Archaeological materials from recent excavations at western Yunnan sites witness the earliest signs of copper-base metallurgy in Yunnan dating around the middle of the 2nd millennium BC; they offer illuminating data for studying the step-by-step development of metallurgy in the...
The Industry of Empire: Investigating the Spatial and Technological Organization of Angkorian Iron Production around Phnom Dek, Cambodia (2017)
Intensive surveys around Phnom Dek, the ‘Iron Mountain’, in central Cambodia have revealed the presence of a massive iron production landscape dating between the 9th and 20th centuries. Using a combination of site morphology, spatial distribution, field pXRF analysis and in-slag radiocarbon datin,g this paper attempts to reconstruct these industrial-scale iron smelting practices with particular emphasis on the Angkorian period (9th to 13th c.). The results will inform on the localized...
The Influence Holocene Changes in Hydrological Conditions and River Course Migration of the Jing and Wei Rivers on the Yangguanzhai Settlement (2017)
Yangguanzhai is located in Xi’an, Shaanxi, at the confluence of the Jing and Wei Rivers. There is an evidence that during the Holocene, the area experienced two major hydrological changes: first, in the middle Holocene, the Jing and Wei Rivers experienced a long period of elevated water levels; and second, over the course of the Holocene, the Wei River moved north while the Jing River moved south. This research used a stratigraphic analysis and GIS to reconstruct the change of the river courses...
The innovations which travelled to the Philippines. An approach to the biological conquest of the islands (XVI-XVIIIth centuries) (2017)
Every process of discovery, conquest and colonization, regardless of its magnitude and historical implications, entails a transformation in those societies in which it takes place. The Philippines, as it had already happened to other parts of the world before, was no exception. The conquest of the Philippines Islands by the Spanish Monarchy supposed the transformation of a very important part of the indigenous population of the islands. In this occasion we studied the biological conquest of the...
Inscribing Behaviors on Oracle Turtle Plastrons: A New Method to Analyze Tributary Networks of Late Shang China (c. 1250 BCE–1046 BCE) (2018)
Processed from turtle shells and bovid scapulae, oracle bones were massively exploited by the ruling house of the late Shang Dynasty for divination. As opposed to traditional scholarship that holds primary interest in inscriptions engraved on these bones, I consider late Shang divination in entirety as a technological process that proceeds from the preparation and delivery of bone material via tributary networks all the way to bones’ after-use discard into pits. By switching the attention to the...