Mid-Holocene climate and cultural dynamics in eastern Central China

Mid-Holocene coastal hydrology and salinity changes in the east Taihu area of the lower Yangtze wetlands, China

“…7500 cal yr BP or even earlier (Lee et al, 2007), with dry farming of millet on hill slopes as the dominant activity (Lu, 2007;Liu et al, 2009) conditioned by the drier climate of northern China, toward the northern limit of the influence of the summer monsoon. In southern China, where monsoonal influence was much stronger, the same period saw the development of wet rice farming on the low-lying wetlands of the Yangtze valley (Crawford and Shen, 1998;Liu et al, 2007;Lu, 2007;Zong et al, 2007), with the marshlands of the Yangtze coastal plain a focus of intensive farming and high populations. By the later mid-Holocene these developed Neolithic cultures established sophisticated and structured societies that relied upon the extensive cultivation of high-yielding cereal crops, a productive but vulnerable economic system that required consistently favourable environmental conditions.…”

“…4200 cal yr BP culturally impoverished or even sterile layers within archaeological sequences suggest that a collapse or outward migration of Neolithic cultures occurred in both the Yellow River and the Yangtze lowlands (Yu et al, 2000;Song, 2002;Wu and Liu, 2004;Shanghai Museum, 2008). While it must be remembered that social and other human factors can also cause culture change (Zhang et al, 2004a,b;Lu, 2007), such is the apparent scale of this cultural disruption that researchers have attributed this event to environmental factors, since it coincides with a period of pronounced climatic cooling and instability that lasted about five centuries, may have been the coldest interlude in the whole Holocene, and had major consequences for human societies (Perry and Hsu, 2000). This cold event had global impacts and can be considered to mark the end of the mid-Holocene climatic optimum.…”

Environmental change and raw material selection strategies at Taoshan: a terminal Late Pleistocene to Holocene site in north‐eastern China

“…Thick and fragile pottery shards were found in the B–A, corresponding to the introduction of ceramics in terminal Pleistocene sites across China, thereby signalling subsistence and mobility shifts (Wu et al , ; Cohen, ). In the mid‐Holocene, more settled Neolithic lifestyles at Taoshan are evident, exemplified by the recovery of polished stone toolkits and abundant pottery, as in other parts of China (Lu, ; Gong, ; Wang et al , ).…”

Pollen and non-pollen palynomorph analyses of Upper Holocene sediments from Dianshan, Yangtze coastal lowlands, China: Hydrology, vegetation history and human activity

“…corresponds to the Lower Yangtze cultural periods of the Eastern Zhou (from 771 BC), the dynasties of , and Han (206 BC-AD 220), the , the Jin Dynasty (AD 280-420), the 'Southern Dynasties' (AD 420-581), the dynasties of Sui (AD 581-618) and Tang (AD 618-906), the Wuyue kingdom and the Song Dynasty (AD 978-1279). Although cultural and social factors were very important (Lu, 2007), the collapse of dynasties, including the Han, Tang and Song, are associated with periods of low temperature and drought (Gao, 1997), which may well have caused crop failures and social conflict, and prompted migration (Ge et al, 1997;Zhang et al, 2005b;Pei et al, 2014Pei et al, , 2018.…”