Emergence of Walled Towns in the Neolithic Jianghan Plain: Warfare or Flooding Control?

Summary

The late Neolithic in the Jianghan plain is characterized by the emergence of a new kind of settlement pattern. In this period, highly nucleated large local communities were walled as regional centers. In the past decades, the emergence of walled sites has caused hot debates on its social dynamics, particularly on function and causal factors. Most explanations for the emergence of walled sites fall into warfare model and flooding control model. To evaluate those models, we investigate into both archaeological data and historical records. Our holistic analysis on archaeological data and historical records indicates that the warfare model is more reasonable in understanding the emergence of local walled sites and the trajectory of local social complexity in the Neolithic period.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• The social lives of forts: Reconsidering the social construction of ancient fortified settlements and their diverse roles in political organization

Keywords

Spatial Coverage