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Later hunter-gatherers in southern China, 18 000–3000 BC

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 February 2012

Zhang Chi  and
Hsiao-chun Hung
Zhang Chi
Affiliation:
1School of Archaeology and Museology, Peking University, Beijing, China
Hsiao-chun Hung
Affiliation:
2Department of Archaeology and Natural History, School of Culture, History and Language and School of Archaeology and Anthropology, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia (Email: hsiao-chun.hung@anu.edu.au)
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Extract

The authors present new research on social and economic developments in southern China in the Early Holocene, ninth to fifth millennia BC. The ‘Neolithic package’ doesn't really work for this fascinating chapter of the human experience, where pottery, social aggregation, animal domestication and rice cultivation all arrive at different places and times. The authors define the role of the ‘pottery-using foragers’, sophisticated hunter-gatherers who left shell or fish middens in caves and dunes. These colonising non-farmers shared numerous cultural attributes with rice cultivators on the Yangtze, their parallel contemporaries over more than 5000 years. Some agriculturalists became hunter-foragers in turn when they expanded onto less fertile soils. No simple linear transition then, but the practice of ingenious strategies, adaptations and links in a big varied land.

Keywords

southern Chinanorthern VietnamNeolithic transitionhunter-gatherersearly farmersrice cultivation
Type
Research article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 86 , Issue 331 , March 2012 , pp. 11 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 2012

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