Reevaluating the Concept of Sustainability in the Context of Animal Resource Utilization in Ancient China

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Resources and Society in Ancient China" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The extraction and utilization of natural resources often come with an underlying question of sustainability. At present, there are constant debates on and readjustments to how sustainability is measured. One of the biggest challenges is to establish suitable baselines to evaluate the balance between resource economies, resource availability, and ecological homeostasis. Archaeology provides not only deep-time data to push ecological baselines back chronologically, but also long-term perspectives on how humans have impacted and have been impacted by changes in natural resource distribution, abundance, and characteristics in the midst of sociocultural, ecological, and climatic fluctuations. This paper explores from a zooarchaeological perspective on how the relationships between human societies and animal resources in ancient China can allow us to examine practices that impact resource sustainability. The discussion focuses on animal husbandry and wildlife exploitation in Neolithic to Early Bronze Age societies in different ecological zones, and on the long-term ecological footprints these practices left at local and regional scales. While sustainability is a relative concept dependent on space, time, sociocultural, economic, and political needs, histories, regenerative characteristics of resources and various other factors, the practices that affect sustainability are accumulative and relevant to the discussion of biodiversity losses we experience today.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Resources and Society in Ancient China   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39760.0