High-Risk Survey For The Earliest Agriculture In North China

University Of California-Davis, Davis CA

Investigators

Abstract

The invention of agriculture is one of humankind's greatest achievements and archaeology's greatest challenges. Despite great strides in archaeological understanding, archaeologists still do not fully grasp why the first experiments with agriculture began so late in time (10,000 BP) and in only a handful of centers (Near East, Mesoamerica, South America, North China, South Asia, Africa). Of this handful, the North China center is the least known and most likely to shed new light on these questions. The problem in North China is that the archaeological hunter-gatherers whose knowledge of plants laid the foundation for agriculture are well removed in time and space from the oldest presently known agricultural cultures (Cishan, Peiligang, and Dadiwan), which are too highly developed to represent the first stages of agriculture. The transitional groups that connect the two, North China's earliest agriculturalists, are missing. For the Dadiwan culture (7000 BP) in western North China, the antecedent hunter-gatherer complex is found 250 miles (400 km) due north, in the Helan-Tengger sequence (12,700 - 10,000 BP) documented in surveys and excavations by a team of Chinese (Chen Fahu) and US scholars (R. Bettinger, R. Elston, P. J. Brantingham, and D. B. Madsen) have been conducting in Nei Mongol Autonomous Region and Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region since 1989. The research suggests that early Holocene plant intensification began in the Helan-Tengger study area but that the earliest agricultural experiments were somewhat further south, toward Dadiwan. These probably began during a warm-wet episode about 9300 BP that encouraged northern hunter-gatherers to intensify plant use and experiment with plant propagation in a limited way to augment more favored food sources, mainly game. A severe, cold-dry climatic reversal documented around 9000 BP forced this pattern further south, to the Dadiwan area, where agriculture became established on a small scale and then expanded dramatically when climate turned warmer and wetter around 8000 BP. Plainly, the early agricultural sites that connect the hunter-gatherer Helan-Tengger complex in the North to the developed agricultural Dadiwan complex in the South must lie in the area between. The proposed survey will use substantial vehicle travel to locate, and foot travel to reach, likely site locations in this intervening area. Archaeological charcoal suitable for radiocarbon dating will be obtained from sites whose stone tools and ceramics place them within the Helan-Tengger to Dadiwan gap. Our research team of US and PRC scholars has extensive experience with this sort of survey north of the Yellow River but none in the proposed study area to its south, where site locations should be different and perhaps more difficult to detect. Success in finding and dating these sites is not assured but would surely be of great significance. It would articulate the first continuous record of the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture in China - and in so doing document this first critical step in the development of one of the world's greatest civilizations.