Page 521 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

lower and middle Yangzi regions and probably in part of the Huai River region; the cultivation
of millet seems to have been concentrated in the lower and middle reaches of the Yellow River.
The earliest evidence of rice agriculture, dating back approximately 12,000 years, has been
located in the Yuchanyan cave in Dao county, Hunan province. The remains are admittedly
sparse — two grains of wild rice and two grains of a cultivar — and it may be that the Neolithic
cultures relied on wild rice in addition to the cultivated variety. Hunting, gathering, and
fishing, however, continued to constitute the main sources of food: the site contained an abun-
dance of animal and plant remains, including fifteen plant species in addition to wild and culti-
vated rice, twenty-eight species of animals, twenty-seven species of birds, five species offish,
thirty-three species of mollusks, as well as turtles and insects. It was not until approximately
four thousand years later — with the Pengtoushan culture — that farming became the main
source of food. The earliest remains of millet agriculture found thus far date back some 8,000
years to the Cishan and Peiligang cultures; we have evidence, however, that the cultivation of
millet by this point was fully developed, a fact that suggests that the origins of this type of farm-
ing date back considerably further.
The types of artifacts recovered from early Neolithic sites display considerable local varia-
tion. Neither pottery nor worked stone has been found in the Emaokou and Yaozitou sites in

Huairen county, Shanxi province; by contrast, pottery (but no worked stone) has been found at
the Xianrendong site in Wannian county, Jiangxi province. Such variations may point to differ-
ing levels of development, or they may merely indicate that the various sites date to different
periods, but the finds raise several tantalizing questions: did the inhabitants of the middle
Yangzi region invent pottery first and only later take up stone working? Do the Emaokou and
the Yaozitou site represent the pre-Neolithic remains of northern China, or was there also a
pre-Neolithic period in the middle Yangzi region?
The earliest Neolithic sites found in southern China and in the middle Yangzi region
uniformly comprise small caves. Early Neolithic sites in the Yellow River area also point to
small-scale settlements, situated in this region on terraces near riverbanks. Archaeological in-
vestigations indicate that relatively large-scale, densely populated settlements developed as
early as 8,000 years ago in several areas, such as the middle Yangzi region, the lower and middle
reaches of the Yellow River, and the Xilamulun River areas; until that point, settlements had
been composed of scattered, small groups of individuals related to one another by blood.

T H E R E L A T I O N S H I P A N D C H R O N O L O G Y O F C H I N E S E N E O L I T H I C C U L T U R E S
Studies of the Neolithic period (which spans the years from 6000 to 2000 BCE) have treated a
variety of topics, including astronomy, geography, agricultural techniques, science, settlements,
social systems, and religion, and have considerably expanded our knowledge of the China's

Neolithic peoples. What follows focuses on the relatively narrow but extremely complex topic of

520 I Z H A N G Z H O N G P E I