Survey, Excavation, and Geophysics at Songjiaheba—A Small Bronze Age Site in the Chengdu Plain

Archaeological survey in the Chengdu Plain of Sichuan Province has revealed settlement patterns surrounding Late Neolithic walled sites, including large numbers of small settlements from the Neolithic, Bronze Age, and Han Dynasty eras. Here geophysical survey and excavation at one of these small-scale sites dating to the Middle Bronze Age are reported, showing for the first time the value of high-resolution geophysics for evaluating site size and integrity in the Chengdu region

Landscapes of prehistoric Northwest Sichuan: from early agriculture to pastoralist lifestyles

We describe a preliminary survey of a relatively unknown part of the eastern Himalayas: northwestern Sichuan. This survey revealed that three phases of occupation are represented across the landscape. Large settlements with dense remains characterize the landscape during the Neolithic (3400–2000 cal b.c.). Following a hiatus in occupation, stone-cist graves characterize the region during the Bronze Age (1450–800 cal b.c.). The lack of settlement remains from this period indicates that mobile pastoralism increased in importance. Finally, between a.d. 500 and 1500, dense scatters of ceramics over a wide altitudinal range correspond to a fragmentation in Tibetan history, when local warlords established themselves in the region. While some changes in occupation and subsistence practices are linked to climate change, others relate to changes in political power. We argue that further survey work is needed to expand our understanding of past land use and the development of pastoralist practices

Paleobot.org: establishing open-access online reference collections for archaeobotanical research

Like other analytic aspects of archaeology, archaeobotany has been growing progressively more quantitative in the past few decades. This may be a sign of the proliferation of increasingly mature and sophisticated methodologies for analyzing botanical data, but associated with the sophistication of quantitative methods is their inherent opacity: the value and applicability of anthropological conclusions drawn from quantitative archaeobotanical data are not only limited by the amount of information that can be extracted from data by sophisticated statistical tools, but also by our ability to draw reasonable anthropological—as opposed to merely statistical—conclusions. Even the words “classification” and “significance” have different meanings in statistics and in anthropology. In this paper, I propose the use of graphical analysis for archaeobotanical data in addition to, or instead of, typical statistical tools like significance tests, variable reduction, and clustering. Applied to data from charred seed assemblages from the ancient Near East, the visual representation of quantitative data has the advantage of handling semiquantitative data better and being interpretable without reliance on the paradigm of a formal statistical test

The Majiayao to Qijia transition: Exploring the intersection of technological and social continuity and change

The transition between the Majiayao (5300–4000 BP) and Qijia (4200–3500 BP) “cultures” in what is now northwestern China’s Gansu Province has typically been defined by major technological changes in pottery forms, subsistence practices, and site locations. These changes are thought to have been driven by a combination of climate change induced cooling and drying as well as human migration into the region from areas further east. Based on our review of literature on the topic, as well as recent fieldwork in the northern Tao River Valley, we suggest that the picture is significantly more complex, with some new technologies slowly being experimented with, adopted, or rejected, while many other aspects of production and social organization persisted over hundreds of years. We hypothesize that these changes reflect the active agency of the inhabitants of southern Gansu during the fifth and fourth millennia BP balancing long-standing cultural traditions with influxes of new technologies. Unlike some societies in other regions at this time, however, increasing technological specialization does not appear to have resulted in growing social inequality, but the archaeological material instead reflects increasingly complex heterarchical organization

A prehistoric copper-production centre in central Thailand: its dating and wider implications

The Khao Wong Prachan Valley of central Thailand is one of four known prehistoric loci of copper mining, smelting and casting in Southeast Asia. Many radiocarbon determinations from bronze-consumption sites in north-east Thailand date the earliest copper-base metallurgy there in the late second millennium BC. By applying kernel density estimation analysis to approximately 100 new AMS radiocarbon dates, the authors conclude that the valley's first Neolithic millet farmers had settled there by c. 2000 BC, and initial copper mining and rudimentary smelting began in the late second millennium BC. This overlaps with the established dates for Southeast Asian metal-consumption sites, and provides an important new insight into the development of metallurgy in central Thailand and beyond

Implications of the loess record for Holocene climate and human settlement in Heye Catchment, Jiuzhaigou, eastern Tibetan Plateau, Sichuan, China

We examine the Holocene loess record in Heye Catchment on the margins of the Tibetan Plateau and China Loess Plateau to determine to which of those regions the climate is more similar; temporal change to wind strength; and modification of the loess record by mass wasting and human activity. Luminescence and radiocarbon dating demonstrate loess deposited in two periods: >11–8.6 ka and <5.1 ka. The 8.6–5.1 ka depositional hiatus, which coincides with the Mid-Holocene Climatic Optimum, is more similar to the Tibetan Plateau, where loess deposition stops, than to the China Loess Plateau, where deposition slows. Grain-size analysis suggests the Heye loess is a mixture of at least three different grain size distributions and that it may derive from multiple sources. A greater proportion of coarse sediments in the older loess may indicate stronger winds compared to the more recent depositional period. Gravel incorporated into younger loess most likely comes from bedrock exposed in slump scarps. Human occupation of the catchment, for which the earliest evidence is 3.4 ka, post-dates the onset of slumping and thus the slumps may have created an environment that people could live in