A Study of Transition to Agriculture in the Ulanqab Region of the Southern Mongolian Steppe Zone of China

Summary

This is an abstract from the "New Thoughts on Current Research in East Asian Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Mongolia steppe is widely thought as a marginal zone for agriculture, yet the recent excavations of two inhabit sites and a survey with more than 1000m2 in Ulanqab, central Inner Mongolia have found evidences that people made efforts to do food production during Neolithic period. By studying site structures and the form, composition and spatial distribution of lithic assemblages based on excavation and survey materials, I explored how the subsistence, mobility and social integration are interplayed to drive the changes of human adaption to the steppe environment across the time of the transition to agriculture. The preliminary results show that during early Neolithic period, a certain degree of population aggregation has developed prior to the development of food production and the mobility declined as the relative importance of food production increased. However, unlike central North China, such tendency did not develop into full-fledged agriculture. Low-level food production has been maintained in this region into the Bronze age and as Holocene Megathermal passed by, the relative importance of hunting has even increased and the stable sedentism has never been evolved.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• New Thoughts on Current Research in East Asian Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23582