Holocene agriculture in the Guanzhong Basin in NW China indicated by pollen and charcoal evidence

Abstract

The emergence and rapid spread of agriculture from the early Holocene has made a great impact on the development of human societies and landscape change. Guanzhong Basin in the middle of Yellow River valley has a long continuous history of agriculture since the Neolithic. The pollen and charcoal records from Xindian in western Guanzhong Basin, together with the known distribution of archaeological sites, provide proxies to reconstruct the history of agricultural activity and landscape change. The concentration and percentage of Poaceae pollen increase from about 7700 yr BP ago and the concentration of charcoal shows the same trend. These records indicate that the ‘slash-and-burn’ cultivation for agriculture began around 7700 years ago. Between 7700 and 5500 yr BP, the evidence of cereal crops remained strong and charcoal concentration and archaeological sites increased greatly, which all indicate increased agricultural activity and the expansion of human populations. This was enhanced by the continuous development of new cultivation tools and techniques between 4700 and 3300 yr BP, especially in the Bronze Age of the pre-Zhou Dynasty. The original agricultural landscape had been settled after 3300 yr BP. Buckwheat became an important crop from around 5500 yr BP, perhaps because of increasing aridity. This is the earliest record of cultivated buckwheat in Neolithic China.

Early Neolithic diets at Baijia, Wei River valley, China: stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis of human and faunal remains

“…The evidence for a human diet at Baijia that included millet as well as aquatic resources is based on only a small number of samples, but it does conform with the view of Laoguantai people being low-level millet producers who gained substantial amounts of food by hunting (Barton et al, 2009;Bettinger et al, 2010). Previous work shows millet cultivation to intensify in the Wei River valley in the Yangshao Period (Huang et al, 2000;Li et al, 2009aLi et al, , 2009b, and the Baijia human bulk d 13 C values support this by lying at the lower end of the range produced by Yangshao humans, excluding the single human sample from Yuan Junmiao site (Pechenkina et al, 2005;Wang, 2004). On the whole, isotopic information shows millet consumption at Laoguantai and Yangshao sites to vary from low to high levels.…”

Reconciliation of hydroclimate sequences from the Chinese Loess Plateau and low-latitude East Asian Summer Monsoon regions over the past 14,500years

“…An intensification in the southerly monsoonal airflow results in an extension of the rainfall belt into the arid interior of the continent and a complementary reduction in desert coverage in northern China (e.g., Liu and Ding, 1998;Yang and Scuderi, 2010;Lu et al, 2013). This induced environmental change has dominated the regional ecological system (e.g., Li et al, 2004;Zhao et al, 2009) and has also affected the rise of civil practices, such as agriculture (Li et al, 2009) and human society (e.g., Zhang et al, 2008). Over recent decades, diverse natural archives, including loess (Xiao et al, 2002;Sun et al, 2010), aeolian deposits (Yang and Scuderi, 2010), lacustrine sediments (Shen et al, 2005), and speleothems Sinha et al, 2005;Wang et al, 2005;Hu et al, 2008;Cai et al, 2010;Dong et al, 2010;Ma et al, 2012;Lone et al, 2014;Zhang et al, 2014;Cai et al, 2015) have been used to improve our understanding of the evolution of regional climates since the previous deglaciation period to aid water resource management and the establishment of a sustainability policy.…”

Pollen and Phytolith Evidence for Rice Cultivation and Vegetation Change during the Mid-Late Holocene at the Jiangli Site, Suzhou, East China

“…Pollen analysis has an important role to play in the reconstruction of the paleoenvironment and landscape of an archaeological site and the surrounding areas [1]–[5]. NPM (non-pollen microfossils) including phytoliths [6], diatoms [7] and starch grains [8], [9] play a necessary complementary role.…”