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from V. - East Asia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2014
Although the Neolithic of northern China is better known due to a longer history of research, South China, with new discoveries and research over the past thirty years, is now a focus of intensive archaeological study concerning the beginnings of the Neolithic, the origins of agriculture and other issues related to the growth and spread of farming societies and their cultural and sociopolitical development. The earliest Neolithic cultures appear in South China after a lengthy but poorly understood transitional period from the Late (or Upper) Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer cultures of the Terminal Pleistocene. Between 12,500 and 9000 cal bp, hunter-gatherer groups in the Middle and Lower Yangzi River regions establish the first sedentary villages in South China, concomitant with parallel and perhaps related shifts in Northeast China and the North China Plain. While pottery appears before 20,000 cal bp in South China, it is in otherwise hunter-gatherer contexts, and so it is the cultural assemblages associated with these villages ten millennia later that we recognise as the earliest “Neolithic” cultures. Interestingly, these sedentary villages appear several millennia before the farming of domesticated plants (particularly rice) probably occurs, and certainly before domesticates contribute a significant amount to overall subsistence: farming, agriculture and the primary domestication of rice (along with a suite of other plants) do not appear rapidly with sedentism and the other initial technological, social and ideological changes that accompany Neolithisation, but rather over a period covering the first 4 millennia of the Holocene. Here we discuss regional cultural developments through the Neolithic across South China, including the beginnings of rice agriculture, changing settlement structures, burial practices, ritual and symbolic activities and craft production.
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