Subsistence in marginal environments and its correlations to environmental fluctuation and changing societal complexity: A case study in south central Inner Mongolia

University Of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

With National Science foundation support, Mr. Gregory Indrisano and a team of Chinese and American archaeologists will conduct an intensive archaeological surface survey of Liangcheng County, Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region (IMAR), People's Republic of China. This project, which will record the size and location of archaeological sites in a 200 square kilometer survey region, will bring together archaeologists from the Institute of Archaeology IMAR, Jilin University and the University of Pittsburgh. The survey region is located 100 km east of the Yellow River and 300 km south of the great steppe regions of Asia, in an area marginal for both agriculture and herding. The environmental attributes of this area make Liangcheng County an ideal geographic location to study the development of subsistence strategies that combine agriculture and animal husbandry. Liangcheng's position, 400 km north of the dynastic capitals at present day Xi'an and just south of the earliest of the Great Walls of China, makes this region appropriate for the study of the development of relations between the core of ancient China and its periphery. The Liangcheng County archaeological survey will include the lowland alluvial plains appropriate for farming, highland mountain plateaus used for herding and the intervening zones that allow access to both resource zones. Interviews with local herders and farmers, as well as analysis of satellite imagery will add to these preliminary subjective impressions of land use and allow the accurate delineation of this region's ecological zones. The information from the archaeological survey and the modern ecological map will facilitate the construction of a geographic database (GIS) to reconstruct how prehistoric peoples made use of their landscapes in response to local and regional level political processes, allowing a better understanding of the development of agro-pastoral adaptations on the periphery of China as well as a better understanding of how such subsistence adaptations develop world wide. In addition, data collected by other studies of the paleo environment of the region will be analyzed to better understand how ancient environmental fluctuations affected subsistence strategies in this region. Mr. Indrisano and his collaborators will concentrate on three main questions: 1. How did the known developments from the center of China affect the development of political and subsistence systems in this peripheral region? 2. Did indigenous political development have a different effect on subsistence strategies? 3. How do ancient environmental fluctuations affect the local subsistence systems of this region? This research is important for several reasons. It will continue the fruitful cooperation between Chinese and American archaeologists, in an area of the world that sees indigenous development of ancient empires. Marginal environs, like those found in Liangcheng County, existed on the borders of many of the world great ancient empires, but the subsistence strategies and political development of these peoples have rarely been a foci of anthropology; this project will provide a data set which will allow a better understanding of subsistence strategies and political development in north China but will also facilitate the comparison of these processes with other marginal regions around the world.