Living in the Marginal Land of Agriculture: The Adaptive Changes and Risks in the Ecotone of North China

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology on the Edge(s): Transitions, Boundaries, Changes, and Causes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ecotones are characterized by diverse resources which would attract hunter-gatherers and early practitioners of food production, but they also have a disadvantage that the resource boundary easily changes with climatic fluctuation. Long-term climatic changes, as well as annual seasonality, would produce significant influence on adaptations of local groups. In North China there is an ecotone between the Mongolian grassland and the deciduous forest zone of the northern plain, and it can be divided into two subzones. This research studies adaptive changes and differences of both subzones during the prehistoric period, focusing on the cultural influence that resulted from long and short-term environmental changes. Explanations are offered for different features of archaeological records in site abandonment, artifact assemblage (especially stone tools), and settlement pattern. Combined with the most recent discoveries, this study shows that Neolithic cultures emerged in both subzones, with the coming of the Holocene Optimum, then formed a mixed economy including early farming and hunting-gathering in a state of unstable sedentism. Interestingly, both subzones apparently had a catastrophic event occur almost simultaneously, in which sites were abandoned entirely and suddenly, possibly due to serious infectious disease.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeology on the Edge(s): Transitions, Boundaries, Changes, and Causes   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23363