A tale of two towns: Demographic and economic change in two middle Yangzi communities

Summary

The late Neolithic marked the emergence of a new kind of settlement pattern in the middle Yangzi river valley. During this period, large, tightly nucleated communities, many of which were surrounded by moats or walls, rapidly replaced the dispersed hamlets and small villages of the middle Neolithic. This dramatic transition in settlement organization may have been associated with significant changes in social and economic relations between individuals both within and between settlements. To address these possibilities, and their potential implications for the evolution of complex societies more generally, we compare the results of a full-coverage regional survey and a geochemical study of local utilitarian pottery. Our analysis indicates that demographic and economic change within these communities occurred at very different rates.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• New Perspectives on the Archaeology of Economics in China   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage