A Study on the Mid-to-Late Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age Agricultural Economies and their Development at Huizui Site, Yiluo Valley Region, China

Summary

In order to gain procedural understanding of early agricultural economies, researches have much to gain from in-depth, diachronic study of agricultural development in a single region. This study focuses on the changes in agricultural plant-use over time in the Yiluo Valley, North-Central China by using archaeobotanical data from the Mid-to-Late Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age occupations (c 3500 – 1500 BC) at Huizui. The study’s analysis confirms that changing plant-use patterns at Huizui were a part of larger agricultural development in the Yiluo Valley region. The Huizui inhabitants relied heavily on millets as their primary means of subsistence, while beginning to include broader range of crops such as wheat and rice toward the Late Neolithic period. The study also finds that statistically significant differential crop and associated weed species inclusions exist between the Mid-to-Late Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age deposits at Huizui. This results suggest an interesting hypothesis, whereby crop consumption at Huizui toward the Early Bronze Age may have involved more trade and importation of processed crop goods than earlier periods. This hypothesis highlights the dynamics of early agricultural development occurring at the Yiluo Valley during the Mid-to-Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age.

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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