Economic differentiation in Hongshan core zone communities: A geochemical perspective

Summary

It is proposed that a greater degree of differentiation between households in Hongshan villages (4500-3000 BC) in northeast China with regard to productive activities implies a greater degree of economic interdependence between households and a more complex economy, which possibly provides leaders with enhanced opportunities to mobilize labor toward such ends. Analysis of household artifact assemblages in the Hongshan periphery has indicated some very modest levels of productive differentiation in lithic production. If the Hongshan core zone showed stronger evidence of productive differentiation and thus a more complex village economy, it might help us to understand how the greater investment in public ritual spaces came to be. A combination of geochemical and mineralogical analyses was thus proposed to investigate productive differentiation between 50 individual artifact (pottery) concentrations of household scale in the Hongshan Core. By recognizing the compositional clusters represented in each household-scale analytical unit, we were able to understand the degree of compositional variety within household units in the Hongshan core zone and the degree of productive differentiation that characterized Hongshan pottery production. This study offers important insight to the role of production and distribution of utilitarian pottery to the economic foundations of early complex societies.

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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