Chinese Archaeology Lecture

May 6, 7:30pm - 9:00pm
Mānoa Campus, Architecture Auditorium Architecture Building

KIN, CRAFTS AND CO-RESIDENCE IN NEOLIOTHIC NORTH CHINA (7000-2800 BC)

By Dr. Christian Peterson
Assistant Professor of Anthropology in East Asian Archaeology
University of Hawaii

A settled agricultural way of life was firmly established in the middle reaches of the Yellow River Valley of northern China by the beginning of the seventh millennium BC. Situated on the banks and floodplains of the slow-flowing tributaries of the Yellow, Wei, and Fen rivers in what are today Shaanxi, Henan, Hebei, Shanxi, and Gansu provinces, these Early Neolithic agriculturists lived in compact villages of related and relatively undifferentiated households.

After another 2000 years, or by the beginning of the Middle Neolithic, village life in the Middle Yellow River Valley had undergone substantial changes. People were living in even more compact settlements, the regional distribution and internal organization of which suggest an increase in the intensity of inter-household interaction, and a fundamental reorganization of previous social and economic structures.

By no later than the mid-third millennium BC this reorganization had facilitated the emergence of regional-scale hierarchical societies. These earliest “chiefdoms” were followed by the widespread proliferation of even larger-scale, more complex, and more hierarchical societies in the Late Neolithic and protohistoric periods.

This lecture focuses on the formative (Early and Middle Neolithic) stages of complex societal development in the Middle Yellow River Valley. Several key social and economic transitions are identified and discussed within the context of longer-term patterns of societal change. Further attention to these changes may ultimately improve our understanding of the developmental prehistory of later Neolithic and Bronze Age societies in this area, and of societal evolution elsewhere. Dr. Peterson is a specialist in the archaeology of China and has been excavating various sites in northern China for the past decade.


Ticket Information
Free

Event Sponsor
LLEA, Archaeological Institute of America, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Robert Littman, 956-4173, littman@hawaii.edu

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