Share the story of what Open Access means to you
![a graphic of a lock that is open, the universal logo for open access](/assets/oa-lock-logo-lg-a95dd8d9f9fe5e21ab4499ffd0c8661e55f7d788ae0a03f19a6749eb82e3e899.png)
University of Michigan needs your feedback to better understand how readers are using openly available ebooks. You can help by taking a short, privacy-friendly survey.
Land Use Among Prehistoric Steppe Societies on the South Mongolian Plateau
Chao Zhao
This book uses a cultural ecological approach to explore how prehistoric societies were economically and socially organized to utilize the steppe environment in the southern Mongolian Plateau before the emergence of specialized herding economies in the early and middle Holocene. The research is based on a combination of excavation and survey data from the Ulanqab region of Inner Mongolia.
The dynamic land use strategies were examined through the lens of subsistence, mobility, and social integration, based on lithic assemblages, settlement patterns, and other material expressions. The results indicate that although the specifics of subsistence practices changed from the Early Neolithic to the Mid-Late Neolithic/Early Bronze age, people made intensive use of the landscape, adopted semi-sedentary lifeways, and combined hunting-gathering with small-scale farming. It reveals a divergent trajectory of cultural adaptation when compared with the core Monsoon-affected zones of northern China during this time period.
The dynamic land use strategies were examined through the lens of subsistence, mobility, and social integration, based on lithic assemblages, settlement patterns, and other material expressions. The results indicate that although the specifics of subsistence practices changed from the Early Neolithic to the Mid-Late Neolithic/Early Bronze age, people made intensive use of the landscape, adopted semi-sedentary lifeways, and combined hunting-gathering with small-scale farming. It reveals a divergent trajectory of cultural adaptation when compared with the core Monsoon-affected zones of northern China during this time period.
-
Front Cover
-
Title Page
-
Copyright Page
-
Archaeology of East Asia
-
Titles in the Archaeology of East Asia Subseries
-
Of Related Interest
-
Acknowledgements
-
Contents
-
List of Figures
-
List of Tables
-
Abstract
-
Foreword
-
1. Introduction
-
1.1. Research question development
-
1.2. Previous study about the origin of agriculture in China
-
1.3. Cultural ecology as the theoretical background to investigate the origin of agriculture
-
1.4. Land-use: a key for exploring human’s subsistence strategy across the transition to agriculture
-
1.5. Reader’s roadmap
-
-
2. Spatial and temporal framework of the study and the characteristics of pottery and lithic assemblages
-
2.1. Geographical settings
-
2.1.1. The environmental conditions of the studied area
-
2.1.2. The general land-use pattern in historical period and today
-
2.1.3. The marginality for agriculture
-
-
2.2. The temporal span for the study
-
2.3. Pottery typology and chronology
-
2.3.1. Early Neolithic pottery typology
-
2.3.2. Mid Neolithic pottery typology
-
2.3.3. Late Neolithic pottery typology
-
2.3.4. Early Bronze Age pottery typology
-
-
2.5. The features and classification of lithic artifacts
-
-
3. Materials and methods
-
3.1. Technological organization
-
3.2. The analysis of the excavation data
-
3.2.1. The introduction of the two excavated sites and excavation methods
-
3.2.2. Analysis of the excavated data
-
-
3.3. The analysis of the survey data
-
3.3.1. Introduction of the field survey
-
3.3.2. Analysis of the survey data
-
-
3.4. Two-tiered comparison
-
3.5. Statistics methods used in the study
-
-
4. Early Neolithic land-use patterns: Excavation data analysis
-
4.1. The comparison of lithic assemblage between the Yumin and Simagou site
-
4.2. The forms and designs of the lithic tools
-
4.3. The distributional patterns of lithics inside and outside the pit houses
-
4.4. The inter-household differentiations of the lithic assemblage
-
4.4.1. The proportional distribution of different tools across the houses
-
4.4.2. The analysis of debitage across the houses of the Yumin and Simagou site
-
-
4.5. Additional sources of evidence illustrating the land use pattern in the Early Neolithic
-
4.6. Discussion and conclusion
-
-
5. Early Neolithic land-use patterns: Survey data analysis
-
5.1. The comparison of the survey and excavation data
-
5.2. Inter-site variations of the survey data
-
5.2.1. Site types: the conceptional frame to inspect inter-site variations
-
5.2.2. Samples and attributes used for evaluating the inter-site variations
-
5.2.3. The identification of the residential sites
-
5.2.4. The task sites
-
-
5.3. Variations of the subsistence practice across the sites
-
5.4. Correlations between sites and environmental settings
-
5.4.1. Paleoenvironment and resource distributions of the survey region
-
5.4.2. The geographic landforms and the site locational choices
-
5.4.2.1. The relative occupational intensity in different landforms
-
5.4.2.2. The proximity to the mountainous area
-
5.4.2.3. The altitude differences around the sites
-
5.4.2.4. The aspects of the sites
-
5.4.2.5. Site distributional pattern
-
-
-
5.5. Summary
-
-
6. Land use patterns of Mid-Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age: Survey data analysis
-
6.1. Technological organization of lithic tools
-
6.1.1. Features of technological organization in general
-
6.1.2. The prevalence of the bifaces
-
6.1.3. The prevalence of facial retouch technique
-
6.1.4. The prevalence of arrowhead
-
6.1.5. The miniaturization of the chipped lithic tools
-
6.1.6. The reduced size of grinding stones
-
6.1.7. The changes in raw materials
-
6.1.8. Summary: the implications of changing technological organization
-
-
6.2. Inter-site variations of the survey data
-
6.2.1. The features of the main residential settlement
-
6.2.2. Site types
-
-
6.3. Variations of the subsistence practice across the sites
-
6.4. Correlations between sites and environmental settings
-
6.4.1. The geographic landforms and the site locational choices
-
6.4.2. The proximity to the mountainous area
-
6.4.3 The altitude differences around the sites
-
6.4.4.The aspects of the sites
-
6.4.5. Site distributional pattern
-
-
6.5. Conclusion
-
-
7. The comparison of land-use pattern between Early Neolithic and Mid-Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age
-
7.1. The comparison of mobility pattern
-
7.2. The comparison of the subsistence practice
-
7.3. The comparison of the levels of social integration
-
7.4. Difference of site distribution across the landscape
-
7.5. Environmental factors which affect the changes of land-use strategy
-
-
8. Discussion and conclusion
-
8.1. Patterns of land use and subsistence
-
8.2. Farming as a supplementary means of the subsistence system
-
8.3. Hunting-Gathering under the condition of Holocene Climatic Optimum
-
8.4. Divergent pathways of the development of subsistence practice: Sticking to the mixed economy with modifications or stepping into intensive agriculture
-
8.5. Reconstructing the subsistence strategy from the land-use pattern
-
8.6. Future research directions
-
-
Bibliography
-
Back Cover
![](/image-service/j3860b04k1702429596/full/full/0/default.png)
Citable Link
Published: 2023
Publisher: BAR Publishing
- 9781407315379 (ebook)
- 9781407315362 (paper)
BAR Number: S3150