Crop Processing in the Lower Yellow River Valley: From Known to Unknown

Summary

As one of the most highly-developed cultural regions in China, many aspects of the lower Yellow River Valley have been systematically studied, including climatic revolutions, cultural patterns, and subsistence strategies, among others. It is now known that the diversified environments of the Valley, including flood plains, hills and coastal regions, facilitated the development of distinctive cultures and subsistence patterns in these areas. These distinctions are principally reflected in their production and processing of crops. In this paper, I will provide an overview of precedent-setting paleoethnobotanical studies in the Valley, and then place them into a framework of climatic and settlement pattern revolution. By analyzing the food structure, spatial distribution of crops, and the ways groups harvested and processed food, I will put forward a model of crop processing in the prehistoric Yellow River Valley, which may then provide a pathway to understand human adaptations and social complexity in this context.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21666