Bulletin

Issue: May 2006

Research in Action

How did China’s first states emerge?

Did efficient peasants producing more food than they could consume contribute to the emergence of the first states?

Did those who ate their excess food have time to produce other goods – and even play politics?

These are intriguing questions being investigated by La Trobe University archaeobotanist, Dr Gyoung-Ah Lee, who is researching the relationship between economic changes and the development of ‘social complexity’ in early China.
A postdoctoral fellow in La Trobe’s Archaeology Program, Dr Lee is examining how the development of agriculture in the Yiluo Region of Henan Province in northern China over a 5000 year period – until about 1500 BC – influenced the progress of political development.

She is involved in a series of ‘digs’ at a number of sites, including ‘loess’ terraces cut into the banks of the Yiluo River, a tributary of the Yellow River, flowing through rich alluvial plains, densely populated throughout history and the site of some of the first known states. (Loess is solidified fine wind-borne dust blown in from Outer Mongolia over thousands of years.)

Dr Lee said that societies in the region became increasingly hierarchical over time, and the earliest urban centres developed there.

By analysing the botanical content, including food crops and weeds, and pollen from loess samples from different dates over the 5000 year period, Dr Lee will construct a picture of the kinds of crops grown and the changes in agricultural practices.

These changes will be compared with other archaeological evidence including the development of settlements and their hierarchies, mortuary practices, scales of population centres, and production of goods.

‘My work will articulate how changes in agriculture may have played a part in the overall socio-political changes,’ Dr Lee said.

She believes she is among the first to engage in in-depth research on changes in agricultural practice and distribution of food resources in the region which is known as ‘the heartland of civilizations’.

Dr Lee began her analysis of material from the region when she gained access to 850 archaeobotanical samples gathered since 1998 by archaeologists including Professor Li Liu of La Trobe’s Archaeology Program.

Professor Liu is a world authority on the Erlitou culture which arose in the area between about 1900 to1500 BC and, although subject to dispute among archaeologists, is believed to have produced the first political groupings or ancient states in China.

Dr Lee began working in 2003 on samples originally collected by Professor Liu and Chinese archaeologists and has returned there, and to other sites, in 2004 and 2005 gathering additional samples.

She said one clue indicating change is the influence of the cultivation of rice as opposed to different kinds of crops including millet, wheat, and soybean.

‘Rice has a higher symbolic value as well as calorific value which means that people eating it have more energy. Interestingly, rice and rice paddy weeds were present only in large centres in the period before the emergence of states – called Longshan Period – which preceded the Erlitou period.

‘The types of artifacts and other evidence from this period indicate that the complexity of society drastically increased from the late Longshan to the Erlitou periods.

‘Rice may have been considered a special luxurious food for elite groups and I suspect that intensification of rice farming may have resulted from increased social complexity and the elites’ demands for luxurious items.’

Dr Lee believes that large centres and small villages may have developed tight bonds through the network of food and that this bonding consolidated into political unity.

Dr Lee was surprised to discover that one ancient agricultural practice has not changed over millennia – the burning of crop stubble.

One of the sites where she is digging is called Huizui, which means ‘Ash mouth’.

There is evidence among the material excavated that 5000 years ago the peasants burned their crop stubble.

‘I have watched farmers in the same area today doing exactly the same thing,’ she said.