An Analysis on the Taosi Cemetery from the Late Neolithic in North-central China

Summary

Taosi is one of the largest sites surrounded by the huge fortification during the late Neolithic in the middle Yellow River valley. So far the archaeologists have excavated a large cemetery, and uncovered a number of burials at Taosi. These burials can be divided into a few categories based on their scale, structure and grave goods, representing the different social ranks. The cemetery consists of several sections, which represent the different social groups. During the early Longshan period, some large tombs were arranged in an area according to their sex and status at first, and then the other large tombs were centrally distributed in another area. During the late Longshan period, a group of large tombs appeared in another district, and the largest one of them with very complex structure and abundant luxury goods was located in a special area alone, so that it looks like a king tomb. In general, this paper will discuss the social change of the Taosi site on the basis of its cemetery analyses.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21179