Bell-shaped Storage Pits and Social Evolution in the Yuanqu Basin, North China

Summary

Control and manipulation of stored food was an important force driving human social evolution. Among the more distinctive forms of storage facilities are bell-shaped pits, which have a global distribution and were common in ancient north-central China. In this paper, size variation of 86 bell-shaped pits, spanning the Neolithic to Early Bronze Age in China’s Yuanqu Basin, are examined in relation to other evidence of sociopolitical complexity and change. The data show a significant increase in the average size, and size range, of bell-shaped pits between the Yangshao and subsequent Late Neolithic and Early Bronze age periods. This may be evidence for increasing inequality, and possibly intensified competition and variable success at control over food production and storage. Moreover, given that concealment was an important function of bell-shaped pits, their presence throughout this sequence may signal household-level management of food stores, resistance to economic control by elites, and perhaps conditions of intense warfare and a desire to hide stores from enemies. These trends are considered in relation to evidence and arguments that the development of sociopolitical complexity, inequality, and state-level societies in China was rooted more in the ceremonial and ideological realm, and less in control over subsistence economics.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage