The five grains grow from the soil. If people tend them well then each field will produce several bushels of grain plus a second yearly harvest; and each melon, peach, date and plum plant will yield bushels of fruit; and herbs and the many vegetables will be overflowing; and every cart will have one of the six livestock or wild birds and beasts in it; and if turtles, alligators, fish and eels breed on time then each will become a multitude; and songbirds, ducks and geese will fill the sky like a sea of smoke. . . . Surely there is surplus enough to feed humanity!
—XUNZI, third century BCE
DOMESTICATING PLANTS AND ANIMALS has allowed humans to dominate large areas of the world’s land surface. The alliance between people and grasses lies at the core of our system. We now use huge areas of the earth’s surface to grow wheat, maize, and rice. Similarly, pigs and cattle now constitute almost half of the earth’s mammals by weight. And domesticated species provide us not only with food but also with building materials, medicines, clothes, and companions. Each new tamed or domesticated species can be thought of as a tool in people’s ecological toolboxes. Since each thrives in a different soil and climate, each opened a new environment to human exploitation, allowing people to replace natural ecosystems with ones that they built themselves. The more of the earth that was farmed, the more of the available sunlight and water went to humans, whose population grew. This chapter examines how this process happened in North China.1
The history of North China’s agricultural systems is one of increasingly domesticated landscapes. Early Neolithic (i.e., agricultural) peoples grew millets while also fishing, hunting, and foraging for wild plants. As agriculture expanded, people learned to cultivate more plants, raise more animals, and breed them for desired traits. Pigs and dogs foraged around villages, later joined by chickens. Fruit and nut trees could be planted on land too steep to grow grains. Ruminants like cattle and sheep allowed people to exploit grasslands and arid places that they had previously found little use for. As agricultural systems became more sophisticated, people became capable of producing surpluses that could support specialists in craft production, warfare, religion, and administration. Agricultural surpluses were the basis of civilization. By the end of the first millennium BCE, much of the forest and grassland in the lowlands of the Yellow River valley had been replaced by grain fields, vegetable plots, and fruit trees. Wild animals were gradually eliminated from the landscape and from people’s diets.
This chapter reviews the formation of North China’s agricultural system from its beginnings until the Zhou period (1046–221 BCE). It synthesizes results that archaeologists and scientists have published over the past two decades with information from ancient texts like the Book of Odes. Comparing archaeological evidence with written and excavated sources reveals the biases of each type of data and allows us to guess what information each leaves out. Many of the processes discussed in this chapter occurred across Eurasia, so we will move between large-scale trends and the specific case of the central Yellow River valley, which was among the most densely populated regions in East Asia for much of the Neolithic. But before getting into domestication we will review the geography of the study region and briefly describe the diverse ecosystems that were transformed by the rise of agricultural civilization.
This book is focused on Shaanxi’s Guanzhong Basin and the surrounding regions: the dry Loess Plateau to the north, the forested Qinling Mountains to the south, and the valleys that stretch eastward to the “Central Plain” around Luoyang, Henan (map 2). The Guanzhong Basin is the lower valley of the Wei River, the Yellow River’s largest tributary, so I will refer to this whole region as the central Yellow River valley. Most early Chinese states and empires were based either in the center of the Guanzhong near the modern city of Xi’an, or 300 kilometers to the east around Luoyang. The most fertile and populous part of ancient East Asia was the North China Plain to the east, but the Guanzhong was often chosen as a capital because it was surrounded by mountains and the Yellow River: a natural fortress. The Guanzhong is also free of the massive floods that occasionally devastate the North China Plain. This section will review the region’s climate and physical geography before turning to its ecology. I encourage readers interested in these topics to consult my other work.2
East Asia’s climate, and therefore its vegetation, is dominated by the monsoons. As the Eurasian continent warms in the spring and summer, its warm air rises and pulls moisture inland from the ocean so that most rain falls in the summer. Cold winters have the opposite effect, blowing cold, dusty air out from Inner Asia. The study region is situated around 34 degrees latitude, as are Los Angeles and Lebanon, but it is somewhat cooler than those places because most of it sits over four hundred meters in elevation. The fluctuation of the monsoons means that the level of annual precipitation fluctuates dramatically, from as low as four hundred millimeters in some years to over nine hundred in others. The region’s high evaporation rate also reduces the amount of moisture available to plants. While enough rain falls most years for farmers to grow millet without irrigation, even hardy millets would die in the driest years. Farmers in the region now have access to irrigation, which allows them to grow various crops, but for much of the period covered by this book farmers relied on hardy millets that could withstand all but the driest years.
The climate has also played an important role in creating the region’s land surface. Over the past few million years the world has cooled, and much of Inner Asia has become a desert whose vegetation is too sparse to protect its soils from wind. Storms have blown so much of this silt eastward that it has accumulated in layers tens of meters deep across an area of four hundred square kilometers, most of which lies north of the Wei River. This soil is called loess, and the region is known as the Loess Plateau (fig. 1). Shallower loess deposits are found across a much larger area. Most soils in the fertile river valleys of North China are composed to some degree of loess eroded from the plateau. As farmers and their flocks damaged the vegetation that held down the soil in the loess region, more soil washed into waterways, raising their beds and increasing the numbers of floods downstream.3
Map 2. The Guanzhong Basin and surrounding regions. To see where this is located in East Asia, see the rectangle on map 1. The star indicates the approximate location of figure 1.
Over the past two million years the earth’s climate has swung between cold glaciations and warmer interglacial periods. Human civilization has arisen within the current interglacial period known as the Holocene (the past 11,000 years). Twenty thousand years ago, during the most recent glaciation, North China was a cold steppe home to now-extinct species like mammoths and wooly rhinoceroses. Some of the species from that time survived into historic times, including horses, humans, sika deer, and aurochs (the wild ancestors of domestic cattle). As the climate warmed, trees migrated northward into the Yellow River valley and the climate arrived at a temperature similar to that of the present in the early Holocene around ten thousand years ago.4
Figure 1. Loess hills overlooking the Yellow River in Lingbao County, Henan.
From around seven thousand to three thousand years ago, a period known as the Holocene Megathermal, the climate was slightly warmer and wetter than at present. It was roughly 1.5 degrees warmer and received around two hundred millimeters more precipitation per year. Earlier generations of scholars often believed that the climate at that time was much warmer than now because of the discovery in North China of species now found only far to the south. They reasoned that since animals like rhinoceroses are now found in the tropics, North China must once have had a tropical climate. But improvements in climate science have made clear that these species were actually eliminated from the Yellow River valley by human activity, not climate change. Our perception of the “natural” ranges of East Asia’s mammals is based on the observations of scientists over the past two centuries, when China’s ecosystems had already been transformed by human activity. In fact, North China’s climate in the Holocene Megathermal was not too different from its climate today. For example, the climate of the Guanzhong Basin at that time was similar to the modern climate of southern Henan, just a few hundred kilometers to the southeast. This warmer and wetter period ended between four thousand and three thousand years ago as the climate became slightly cooler and drier. It has stayed like that, on average, into modern times.5
It is tempting to try to link that period’s drying climate to changes in human societies. However, paleoclimate data tell us only about gradual changes in long-term averages, not the shorter events that really matter to farmers—like droughts and violent storms. The only exception are major floods, which leave distinctive fine-grained sediments. The drying trend probably made a difference in marginal zones that had just barely enough precipitation to grow millets. But for the most part we still lack the type of evidence necessary to understand the role of climate in the history of this period. It is especially complicated to isolate climate as a variable for this period because sheep and cattle happened to arrive around the same time. Herding these animals helped people subsist on arid landscapes precisely at the time when large areas of the Loess Plateau were becoming too dry for farming.
Chinese civilization has always been based in arable river valleys and plains. These are geologically young parts of the landscape composed of sediments eroded from surrounding loess and rocks. In terms of geology, the Wei River and the Yellow River to its east flow in a 1000-kilometer east-west geological crack between the North China Plate and the South China Plate. These came together over two hundred million years ago. The North China Plate is over two billion years old, and its features have been worn down over the ages. This is why the Loess Plateau’s hills are low and rolling, though they have become more dramatic in geologically recent time after being blanketed by a thick layer of loess, which erodes to form steep gullies. South of the Guanzhong, the steep slopes and narrow valleys of the Qinling Mountains are much younger, having risen over the past fifty million years along with the Tibetan Plateau. The Qinling Mountains reach their highest point at Mount Taibai (3,767 meters) and become smaller to the east. They are covered in lush forests because the cold temperatures of the high mountains force clouds moving northwestward from the ocean to drop their moisture. This casts a rain shadow to the north so that the Guanzhong Basin and the Loess Plateau are comparatively dry.
North China’s vegetation is often familiar to people from Europe or North America because the forests of all three regions evolved together, and plants have continued to migrate between them. Northern temperate forests formed in northern polar regions over fifty million years ago when the world was warm, and gradually moved southward, blanketing large swaths of the northern hemisphere. Since then, the earth has cooled and mountain ranges have risen, blocking precipitation from moving into the continent and causing grasslands to replace forests in the dry interiors. This process left both Eurasia and North America with forests in coastal or mountainous areas separated by vast inland grasslands and deserts. Between the two biomes of forests and grasslands lie savannas in which trees and shrubs grow in wetter areas and grasses and herbaceous plants dominate drier ones. The Guanzhong Basin lies in just such a boundary, between eastern forests and Inner Asian grasslands. Until people converted it to farmland, much of the region was covered with grasses, shrubs, and herbaceous plants like asters and Artemisia, while trees, including oaks, elms, cypresses, and pines, grew in valleys and other wet areas.6
Unlike the temperate forests of Europe and North America, which are divided from those in the tropics by seas and deserts, East Asia’s forest zone stretches all the way from Malaysia to Siberia, forming a continuum from the tropics to the taiga. This allowed the region’s flora and fauna to become remarkably diverse because they could migrate freely to the south or north as the climate shifted. East Asia was also spared glaciation because Inner Asia was so dry that ice sheets never formed there. In contrast, glaciers have repeatedly plowed over Europe and North America over the past two million years. In those places, flora migrating south encountered the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Mexico, and many of them became extinct. Because of this, East Asia has the most diverse temperate ecosystems in the northern hemisphere. This diversity provided people with a great variety of plants and animals to domesticate and facilitated the rise of civilization there. But civilization has dramatically reduced this diversity, replacing virtually all of the natural ecosystems of lowland East Asia with farmland. Most trees that now grow in the Yellow River valley’s lowlands are those planted by people, mostly fruit trees or fast-growing timber trees like poplars. Forests survive only in high mountains like the Qinling.7
North China was also home to a diverse array of animals (fig. 2). Large herbivores included rhinoceroses, aurochs, wild water buffaloes, wild horses, and several species of deer. Carnivores included tigers, leopards, black and brown bears, wolves, dholes, raccoon dogs, and various smaller cats and weasels. Moles, shrews, bamboo rats, rock squirrels, porcupines, and badgers burrowed in the ground. Squirrels scampered in the trees. And various toads, geckos, lizards, and snakes lived in the forests and grasslands. Most of these species are now gone, or rare. Only the birds still retain any trace of their former diversity, because they can fly. I have watched birds across the region and have found that the most common birds now are sparrows, swallows, swifts, bulbuls, doves, wagtails, and magpies. Black kites and crows like rooks and jackdaws were also once common but are now rare. Wetlands once flourished in the summer rainy season along waterways and in poorly drained areas. They were home to hard- and soft-shelled turtles, frogs, toads, and salamanders. People regularly ate freshwater snails and mussels. The Qinling’s waterways are still home to the world’s largest amphibian, the endangered Chinese giant salamander, which grows up to two meters long and weighs up to fifty kilograms. In the streams south of Xi’an I have seen mallards, mandarin ducks, common kingfishers, little egrets, black-crowned night herons, and sandpipers. And of course rivers and wetlands were home to a wide variety of fish.8
This was the environment inhabited by the first farmers in the region. Although they came to depend more and more on domesticated plants and animals over the millennia, people continued to fish, hunt, and forage for wild plants, mushrooms, and aquatic creatures throughout the period of this study. The mythical transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer was actually a transition to farmer-fisher-hunter-forager.
The domestication of plants and animals allowed our species to take over the world. Until a few decades ago, most scholars agreed that this was a wonderful thing. This is not surprising since scholars tend to come from agricultural societies in which it is widely believed that a life of sedentary farming is better than one of foraging, fishing, and hunting. This agricultural bias is so strong that scholars have only recently recognized it as such. Some have gone further, idealizing pre-agrarian life. We now know that foraging people are often aware of the possibility of growing their own food. Rather than being ignorant of farming, they may choose to avoid it because they already have a good diet and are not attracted by the heavy labor and reduced dietary variety of agrarian life. The reason agriculture has become the main subsistence strategy around the world is not that it makes life better. Rather it creates much denser populations, so that farming societies have the numbers, the complex social organizations, and the diseases to conquer foraging peoples. The entire Sino-Tibetan language family may have originated with the early farmers of the Yellow River valley, who spread across the continent as their numbers continued to grow, absorbing or eliminating other languages along the way.9
Figure 2. (overleaf) Native mammals of the central Yellow River valley. Larger animals are shown on the right, with smaller ones on the left at a different scale. For more information, see Lander and Brunson, “Wild Mammals of Ancient North China.”
Agriculture probably arose in the Holocene because it was the first interglacial warm period in which modern Homo sapiens were spread around the world. Farming flourished in the unusually stable Holocene climate. The first modern humans arrived in East Asia as early as 80,000 years ago. Paleolithic (pre-agricultural) humans seem to have prospered in the warming climate after the last glaciation. They invented pottery and better stone tools and found many new ways to exploit plant foods, a precursor to growing their own food. Nothing more than stone tools survives of their material culture, but they surely had a deep knowledge of the useful properties of organic materials and how to process them into food, clothing, and tools. Skills like basket weaving, whose traces are preserved in later pottery impressions, were essential for Paleolithic life.10
The “agricultural revolution” was once thought to have been an event that occurred relatively quickly, but in fact it began over ten thousand years ago and is not over yet. The archaeology of early domestication in China is not well developed, and we do not really understand how plants and animals were first domesticated there. Ethnographic research has shown that people in small foraging societies usually obtain resources from a defined area that centers on a place to which they usually return to share food. They need to have an intimate knowledge of which wild plants and animals are available at each time of year and usually have systems to regulate access to these resources. Based on this knowledge, people modify their environments in various ways, some of which increase the growth of useful plants and animals at the expense of ones for which they have no use. For example, they might burn forests to create meadows that attract deer or modify waterways to facilitate fishing. Given their profound knowledge of their ecosystems and how they could modify them, ancient people living in productive and diverse regions like North China must have understood how to shift toward a subsistence system more heavily focused on producing their own foods, but had no specific reason to do so as long as it was easier to gather wild resources. One of their main goals was surely to reduce the risk of starving during the winter and spring months when food was scarce. Early agriculture may have been an unintended consequence of foragers making decisions about how to obtain food from landscapes that they were beginning to modify.11
Archaeologists no longer think in terms of a simple dichotomy between wild and domesticated species. When people harvest grasses and replant their seeds, the grasses quickly evolve traits suitable to human cultivation. But if people stop harvesting them, they soon develop traits they need to survive without humans. The inadequacy of the wild/domesticated dichotomy is also clear when we consider how people can reorganize their ecosystems without any domesticated species. Just by discarding the seeds of the fruit they collected, people often created accidental orchards around their villages. These fruit and nut trees created productive landscapes that lasted longer than individual human lives, creating multigenerational links to groves or orchards of which people might feel some kind of ownership. In the long term, their preference for larger and tastier fruits was a selection process that modified the plants themselves, but human action transformed the landscape long before this happened. The domestication of animals also involved long periods in which people managed the populations of species they hunted without consciously breeding them for desired traits. When I was in school I was taught that humans had captured and intentionally tamed the animals they sought to domesticate. However, it turns out that it took thousands of years of herding animals for people to build up the skills to intentionally catch and tame animals. This did eventually happen with horses and camels, but it is a relatively unusual form of domestication.12
The first species with which humans formed an alliance—for it was clearly a relationship of equals—was a powerful carnivore. Wolves once lived across the northern hemisphere, from the tundra through the forests and into the deserts of Eurasia and the Americas. They live and hunt in hierarchical packs, running at high speeds to take down large herbivores. They also hunt a wide variety of smaller animals such as snakes, birds, and rodents. Wolves were probably attracted to human settlements for their food scraps and gradually formed a symbiotic relationship with humans, after which people bred them to encourage various useful traits. The earliest evidence of dogs in North China dates to around ten thousand years ago, but we can assume that they were there before that since there is earlier evidence of dogs farther north. Dogs help people hunt and herd, but their most useful traits are their loyalty to those who feed them and their noisy and aggressive behavior toward strangers of any species. Along with their superior senses of hearing and smell, these traits make them the perfect alarm system. Groups of dogs not only intimidate large mammals like tigers and humans; they also hunt small animals that get into granaries and other food caches, creating a zone around human settlements that is safe to familiar people and animals but intimidating to almost any size of intruder, a characteristic as useful to people in a small hunting camp as to a farming village. And, to top it off, they are edible.13
Millets were the most important crops in North China’s history, the key plants that allowed people to gradually become sedentary (fig. 3). The main millets domesticated in the region were broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum, also called common millet) and foxtail millet (Setaria italica). Both are annual grasses with sturdy stems whose seeds are protected by hard hulls that allow them to be stored for several years when dried. Unlike perennial plants, some of which grow for many years, annuals produce seeds and then die at the end of each year. Annuals like millets and soybeans sprout in the spring, when the spring monsoon rains fall in the loess lands. They specialize in colonizing disturbed ecosystems and were probably common plants in the areas around human settlements.14
Millets are among the easiest grains to cultivate and the fastest to ripen, and they require relatively little water, which explains why they have been cultivated in so many parts of the world. Broomcorn millet has a growing season of about two months and can be grown in areas with four to five hundred millimeters of rain, while foxtail millet has a growing season of three months and requires more water. Recent research has shown that people ate wild millets thousands of years before they began to manage them. As people began to collect and then sow their seeds, millets adapted by evolving traits that facilitated the dispersal of their seeds, thereby beginning the domestication process. Some sites in early Neolithic North China had large numbers of grain storage pits and are the earliest known sites in East Asia in which people relied heavily on grain. The stores of millet at the Cishan site date as early as 8000 BCE, and the earliest millets widely agreed to show morphological evidence of domestication date to around 6000 BCE.15
As in other parts of the world, cultivating grains allowed people to store large quantities of food, allowing for population growth, increased population density, and the geographical expansion of agricultural peoples. The widespread cultivation of grains also made possible the formation of political organizations because, unlike many other food crops, grains grow above ground and all ripen at once, making it easier for elites to take their cut of the harvest. Grains, along with honey and wild fruit, were also fermented to make alcohol, which not only relieves pain and infection but also played an important role in social life from family gatherings to religious and political rituals. It is even possible that making alcohol was a main incentive for early foragers to cultivate grain. Millets remained the dominant grains in the region throughout the period of this study, though people also grew wheat, rice, and soybeans.16
Figure 3. Eurasian tree sparrows eating foxtail millet. Like pigeons, mice, and many other animals, sparrows capitalized on the spread of agriculture and became common, and vocal, members of the agrarian ecosystem.
The first people to cultivate millets were not farmers in any standard sense. They continued to travel between places that had wild resources such as fish or nuts at specific times of year. This seasonal cycle allowed them to plant millet at specific places and then return to harvest it later. They could choose to cultivate less when other food was abundant, but they could also grow a lot of millet if they wanted to. Although people were storing grain at Cishan in the North China Plain as early as 8000 BCE, archaeologists have yet to find any sites in the Guanzhong dating between 10,000 and 7000 BCE (map 3). Moreover, archaeological remains from the subsequent Laoguantai period (7000–5000 BCE) are both sparse and shallow. Despite the paucity of archaeological evidence, studies of charcoal in soil show that burning increased significantly in the Laoguantai period. This is presumably evidence of the region’s first farmers burning land to cultivate grain. Around the world early farmers tended to regularly burn the vegetation surrounding their settlements. This could have destroyed the vegetation that held soil in place and caused the erosion that can be seen in the archaeological record, though our earliest evidence of this comes from later periods.17
Map 3. Early Neolithic sites mentioned in the text.
Of the twenty-odd Laoguantai culture sites, Dadiwan is the best preserved and excavated. It is situated in the hills 100 kilometers to the northwest of the Guanzhong. For most of the sixth millennium BCE the site was seasonally occupied by people who subsisted largely on foraging and hunting but grew and stored broomcorn millet to eat and to feed to their dogs. Artifacts excavated from the Guanzhong suggest that farming was not a central part of subsistence at this time. They included a variety of nonagricultural tools such as bone arrowheads, shell- and stone-cutting tools, and barbed bone spearheads possibly used to spear fish. Stable isotopes from a small sample of human bones suggest that the people ate significant amounts of millet—though less than people a few millennia later—as well as plenty of fish and mollusks.18
Human populations were low, but they still seem to have reduced the diversity of animals in the plain. Archaeological sites in the forested mountains to the west of the Guanzhong contained a much greater diversity of animals than those in the plain. The greatest diversity of mammals was discovered at the Guantaoyuan site, which is situated on a terrace over thirty meters above the Wei River in the mountains west of the Guanzhong. Some agricultural tools were excavated, but the faunal assemblage, as well as spears and a fishing hook, show that these people did plenty of hunting and fishing. Around half of the remains came from seven species of deer. Other remains included carp, eagles, cranes, pheasants, golden snub-nosed monkeys, foxes, hog badgers, black bears, rhinoceroses, water buffaloes, aurochs, and gorals (similar to mountain goats). This was clearly a situation in which a small number of people took full advantage of the diversity of the region’s wildlife. Most later sites have far fewer species. It is worth noting that we do not have a very representative faunal record because until recently archaeologists in China rarely employed screens at archaeology digs, so they missed most of the bones of small animals.19
In terms of total numbers, deer and pigs made up most of the faunal remains excavated from Neolithic sites in this region. Wild pigs live in a wide variety of environments and are famous for their ability to eat almost anything, including acorns, insects, fungi, and carrion. Like dogs, pigs were attracted to human settlements for their edible refuse, something that people probably appreciated and encouraged because it tidied up their settlements and made pigs easier to kill and eat. Pigs lived alongside humans in a kind of semidomesticity for millennia. Most pigs at Dadiwan were killed when they were young, which suggests that they were a managed population, but the carbon isotopes in their bones suggest that they mainly ate wild foods. People did not necessarily aim to domesticate pigs, but they obviously would have preferred those that were less skittish or aggressive. This gradually caused more docile breeds to develop, which, as in the case of other domesticated animals, reduced the sizes of their brains. Humans still had plenty of wild animals to choose from at this time, so pigs would have to wait a few millennia to become people’s favorite source of meat.20
Deer specialize in disturbed environments, which made them one of the few large mammals that could benefit from the early spread of farming. By providing deer with concentrated food sources, grain fields attracted them to settlements, where people could hunt them. More importantly, early farmers cleared patches of land and then abandoned them after a few seasons, creating a patchwork of vegetation types—perfect deer habitat. The most common deer excavated in North China are sika deer, which are relatively large (60–140 kilograms) generalists native to the temperate-subtropical forest region of East Asia. The closely related red deer (known in North America as elk) were also hunted. Elaphures (Père David’s deer) are around the same size as those two, but they specialize in river valleys and wetlands, as do the small water deer. Both are frequently found in lowland sites. Other commonly hunted deer were roe, a smaller northern species, and musk deer, dog-sized deer that defend their forest territories with sharp fangs.
People also hunted several other species of large mammals, but these animals had less to gain than deer from the spread of farming, and all of them eventually disappeared from the region. Asian two-horned (“Sumatran”) rhinoceroses were native to the region, which shows that the current tropical distribution of rhinoceroses is the result of humans’ extirpating them from temperate East Asia. Aurochs, the wild ancestors of domesticated cattle, were also native to the region, but are now extinct. Their history remains poorly understood because their bones are easily confused with those of domesticated cattle. The water buffaloes excavated from many sites and frequently depicted on Bronze-Age ritual vessels are not the ancestors of domesticated water buffaloes, as was once thought, but are rather a wild species that is also now extinct. Domesticated water buffaloes were later brought from India to China. Other species excavated in the area include raccoon dogs, wild cats, porcupines, badgers, and gazelles. People, in other words, were just one of the animals in the landscape.21
People of the central Yellow River valley first came to rely heavily on domesticated plants and animals during the fifth and fourth millennia BCE, the time of the Yangshao archaeological culture. This is when people settled in villages and their populations began to grow (map 4). Year-round settlements left much more substantial archaeological remains than the seasonal camps of earlier times, and the Guanzhong is home to several of the best-preserved and -excavated Neolithic sites in China. The region was one of the most densely settled areas of East Asia at this time. Both pollen and zooarchaeological evidence suggest that humans were a significant factor in the region’s ecology. Nonetheless, the population was still much smaller than it would later become. Villages that were home to a few hundred people were scattered across the landscape, leaving plenty of room for wild plants and animals, which remained important in people’s diets.22
As people became increasingly sedentary, they were able to collect more things and put more effort into producing them. The quantity and quality of pottery increased.23 People had previously worn mostly skins and furs, but they began to make more of their textiles from plants like hemp. We know this because sites from this period contain many spindle whorls, which were used to spin fibers into thread. This period also has the earliest evidence of differences between families in terms of wealth or status. Whereas houses in fifth-millennium-BCE settlements were roughly equal in size, later sites often had one building that was significantly larger and clearly differentiated from other buildings, indicating either that some families achieved a favored status or that buildings were constructed for community activities. There is also evidence from burials that males were beginning to occupy a higher social position than women, which suggests that inequality between the sexes began as soon as material inequalities began to emerge.24
The maps of archaeological sites in this chapter show that Neolithic people tended to concentrate along waterways and avoided plains without running water. It should be emphasized that maps 4 and 5 are not the results of systematic surveys, nor do they depict all sites from a specific time period. Rather, they depict all known settlements of specific archaeological cultures as identified by archaeologists. They depict all known sites from very long periods, which means that most of these sites were not occupied at the same time. Although some of the sites contain thick cultural deposits and seem to have been used repeatedly or perhaps even continuously for centuries, others are shallow and were inhabited briefly. There were undoubtedly still foraging groups who migrated to exploit seasonal resources and whose short-term settlements are unlikely to be found by archaeologists. Even in permanently occupied sites people would not have constantly tilled the same fields. They would have farmed each for a few years and then abandoned it for any number of years before burning it and planting it again. Land was abundant, and the villagers could practice relatively long fallows even while living at a single site, which saved them from having to fertilize the fields.25
Map 4. (overleaf) Archaeological sites of the Yangshao culture. Each dot indicates an archaeological site identified by archaeologists as belonging to the Yangshao culture (c. 5000–3000 BCE). The numbers indicate the general locations of ① Beishouling 北首嶺, ② Anban 案板, ③ Banpo 半坡, ④ Jiangzhai 姜寨, ⑤ Lingkoucun 零口村, ⑥ Shijia 史家, and ⑦ Xipo 西坡.
The early Yangshao sites of Jiangzhai and Banpo, both east of Xi’an, are by far the best-excavated villages in the Guanzhong in any period. Like other villages from this period, they centered on a communal open space surrounded by a ring of houses, around which they dug ditches about five meters deep. These ditches may have served for defense from humans or wild animals and perhaps also as gardens. The division of these villages into several compounds of about the same size suggests that there was little socioeconomic stratification. Banpo was one of the first Chinese Neolithic sites to be extensively excavated, in the 1950s. For decades it was one of the main sites upon which scholars based their analysis of China’s prehistory. Thousands of artifacts were discovered at the site, including ceramics, stone-cutting tools, grinding stones, and various tools made of bone and antler, such as needles and arrowheads. Vessel types included pots used to carry water, tripods placed over fires for cooking, large storage jars, and polished red ware for eating. Cutting tools made of shell and ceramic were probably used to harvest grain. Spindle whorls and impressions of basket weaves on pottery show that people wove various plants into textiles and other objects. People seem to have eaten plenty of fish. Notched stones assumed to be fish net weights were found at many sites, as were bone fishhooks and ceramics with fish painted on them.26
Fifteen kilometers northeast of Banpo, the Jiangzhai site consisted of more than sixty houses clustered into five or so groups, four of which clearly had one building larger than the others. These have been interpreted as representing a division of the village into extended family groups. There were some differences of wealth between households as well as indications of economic specialization, both of which suggest that the society was gradually becoming divided into family groups that held wealth privately. Like other contemporary sites, Jiangzhai’s material culture included a variety of stone and bone tools, spindle whorls, and ceramics.27
Jiangzhai’s pollen record shows the usual predominance of Artemisia and other herbaceous plants, plus a mix of coniferous and deciduous trees. Ten pollen samples taken from the Lingkoucun site to the east suggest that villagers cleared the woodlands around their settlements. During the four centuries after 5400 BCE, tree pollen at that site declined from an average of 17 percent to 3 percent, while grass pollen rose from an average of 13 percent to 80 percent. The samples from the earlier period include pollen from spruce, fir, pine, hemlock, hazel, birch, oak, elm, hackberry, and wingnut, but only pine was consistently found in the later periods. People probably cleared most of the woods around the site for firewood and land to farm. The percentage of Typha (cattails or bulrushes) also declined over time, which indicates a reduction of wetlands in the area.28
Human skeletons from this period were relatively tall and had few physiological deficiencies. They also had well-used teeth with few caries, very different from the teeth of later people who ate lots of boiled grain. All of this suggests that they had a healthy mixed diet composed of both wild and domesticated species. The analysis of isotopes in human bones shows that Yangshao people depended more on millets and pigs than had earlier people. Millets were the main staple of Yangshao villages, but chestnut, hazelnut, pine nut, and hackberry seeds found at Banpo suggest that nuts and fruits were also important. Wild walnuts have been found at other Neolithic sites and may have been gathered in the Guanzhong as well. Nuts are nutritious and durable and were probably an important food source at some times of year. Less palatable nuts, such as acorns, could still provide plenty of food if crops failed. As agricultural populations grew in subsequent millennia, the people cleared forests and their nut trees, reducing the resilience of farming communities to crop failures. There is also evidence that people may have brewed beer at this time.29
In these early villages, pigs and dogs wandered freely. Pigs became an inseparable part of human communities at this time, though people still also ate plenty of deer and other animals. Pigs foraged for their own food, cleaned up village refuse, and ate any extra or spoiled crops. The pigs of Neolithic China are the ancestors of China’s indigenous domestic pigs, which early modern Europeans bred with their own hogs to create the breeds now exploited in industrial pig farming globally. People in Henan tended to eat more pigs than their neighbors in the Guanzhong, who ate more wild animals. China’s dogs gradually became smaller. The remarkable similarity of the dogs that roam freely in human communities around the world suggests that there is some evolutionary advantage in that niche for brown dogs that weigh about fifteen kilograms. From this period until recent decades, people, dogs, and pigs have lived together in China, sharing each other’s sounds, smells, and even diseases.30
People had already reduced the diversity of wildlife in the plain by this time, but farming villages were still outposts of humanity surrounded by wild spaces. Animals excavated from sites in the Guanzhong Plain include wild sheep (probably argali), wild horses, raccoon dogs, dholes, badgers, hog badgers, hedgehogs, short-faced moles, five kinds of deer (red, sika, musk, water, and roe), as well as pheasants, pelicans, eagles, cranes, carp, soft-shelled turtles, and freshwater snails. This shows that people gathered animal protein from forests, wetlands, and mountains. The contemporaneous site at Dadiwan, in the mountains to the west, included even more diverse wildlife. In addition to those mentioned above, it had leopards, tigers, leopard cats, flying squirrels, rhinoceroses, wild horses, serows, and a single mysterious elephant bone. Most of these animals would once have inhabited the plains (the goatlike serow and argali sheep live only in high mountains), so the absence of these other animals from sites in the Guanzhong Plain was probably due to human activity. Of course, we cannot be sure that animals whose bones were not found in Neolithic sites were absent from the region.31
Let us now turn to the fourth millennium BCE, the second half of the Yangshao period. The population continued to grow. Several sites of this period are larger than any earlier site and contain sizeable buildings and rammed-earth walls that suggest growing social stratification and intersettlement violence. In particular, the middle Yangshao Xipo site in Henan and the late Yangshao strata at Dadiwan and at Anban in the western Guanzhong were much larger than other settlements in their regions. They were probably regional centers. All three settlements had one building that was significantly larger than the others, evidence either of growing inequality or of centralized ritual activity.32
The trend toward more farming and less hunting continued in the fourth millennium. At Jiangzhai, the percentage of hoes and other farming tools increased to one-third of the total tools found. The quality of these tools also improved, with most stone tools being polished and many having holes drilled through them. New agricultural tools came into use, such as rectangular to semicircular knives of stone and ceramic, along with stone and mussel-shell sickles, both of which were probably used for harvesting grains. As in the early Yangshao, fish net weights and spindle whorls are evidence of string- and cloth-making. There seems to have been a gradual reduction in the number of fish spears, but not net weights. An increased use of nets could indicate that larger fish were becoming less common as fishing pressure increased, making spears less useful than nets. Nets can have a greater impact on fish populations because they catch smaller fish.33
Foxtail millet gradually overtook broomcorn millet as the main crop. As millet fields came to occupy larger areas, various disturbance-adapted plants moved into them and became agricultural weeds, most notably wild millets, but also herbs such as purslane, cinquefoil, bedstraw, perilla, chenopods, and knotweed. Chenopods (e.g., lamb’s quarters) and perilla may have been cultivated. Soybeans were a weedy plant that grew around human settlements and produced nutritious seeds. At some point people began to select and plant soybeans with higher levels of oil content, eventually leading to the formation of oilier cultivars. People also planted dry rice, which was a well-established crop in the Yangzi valley by this time, but it required more water than millets and remained a minor crop in the central Yellow River region.34
Millets are more than 10 percent protein, but they are low in lysine and other amino acids, so overreliance on them causes malnutrition as well as caries. The poor oral health in the skulls excavated from the mid-Yangshao Xipo site suggests that those people’s diets were overly dependent on grains. That site had a higher population density than any site in the Guanzhong. It is probably not a coincidence that the earliest traces of malnutrition come from the largest settlement of the time. Growing populations often overexploit resources that could be hunted or foraged, forcing them to rely more heavily on grains, which has been the general dietary trend for most of China’s history. There was also a greater difference in body sizes between males and females at Xipo than at smaller sites, suggesting preferential treatment of boys in situations of food scarcity. Along with the evidence of increasing differences between men’s and women’s tombs mentioned above, we can vaguely discern the formation of gender inequalities. The transition toward a sedentary lifestyle allowed women to have more children, which reduced their mobility and led to a more gendered division of labor by restricting women to work that could be done around the home.35
People were continually experimenting with plants and learning to cultivate more of them. Several of the world’s most popular fruits were domesticated in China, but we know little about this history. The archaeological study of plant remains is a fairly new field in China, and archaeologists are more likely to recover plants that were eaten year-round rather than seasonal ones such as fruits. The poems in the first-millennium BCE Book of Odes mention jujubes, a.k.a. Chinese dates (Ziziphus jujuba), and several fruits of the Prunus genus, probably including peaches, apricots, and cherries. The earliest peach stones similar to those of modern domesticated forms were found in lower Yangzi sites of the fourth millennium BCE, and genetic research suggests that cherries were first domesticated around the Sichuan Basin. The Odes also mention various pears or crab apples, as well as Chinese quince, though none of these were necessarily domesticated. Domesticated apples, which are now one of the most common fruits in the region, probably arrived in China from Central Asia sometime in the past two millennia. We can be sure that future research will reveal a long history of fruit cultivation in North China. Cultivating fruit and nut trees allows people to cultivate sloping land unsuitable for farming and to plant trees far from their homes that they need visit only at harvest time.36
Just as people’s dependence on cultivated plants increased in this period, the ratio of domesticated animals to wild ones also increased. This was especially clear at large sites such as Xipo, where pigs constituted over four-fifths of animal remains. Pigs and sika deer remained the most common animals at most sites in the Guanzhong. In addition to those, the Dongying site contained remains of aurochs, wild water buffaloes, water and musk deer, badgers, cats, and wild sheep. It was not until the arrival of domesticated sheep and cattle in the subsequent Longshan period that domesticated animals mostly replaced wild ones in people’s diets.37
As agriculture occupied more of the landscape, various plants and animals came to inhabit it. Weeds and insects flourished in farmed fields, as did hedgehogs, hares, and hamsters. Rodents such as mice and rats took advantage of all the food in settlements. Sparrows, pigeons, and other birds specialized in eating agricultural crops and their insect pests. Bats and swallows learned to roost in buildings, perfect locations from which to hunt the many insects that flew around villages. Domesticated cats had not yet arrived in China from Southwest Asia, but wild cats frequented human settlements to hunt all these small animals. Farming villages were becoming their own ecosystems.38
Agricultural societies were expanding, as was their environmental impact. Systematic archaeological surveys in western Henan revealed that there were larger and more numerous settlements during the middle Yangshao period than at any other time in the Neolithic. They also showed that the most densely populated areas were later abandoned, possibly due to environmental degradation. Similarly, studies of sedimentation in the lower Yellow River show that it was about this time that erosion began to increase in North China, at least partly caused by human activity. There is also local evidence that farmers in the Guanzhong began to transform soils by adding organic materials and mineral grains. The late Yangshao was probably the period of greatest population density and site size in the Guanzhong before the Bronze Age.39
The pace of change accelerated after 3000 BCE. The use of oracle bones for divination became widespread, multiroom buildings became increasingly common, ceramic technology continued to improve, and metallurgy arrived from Inner Asia. The trend toward increased reliance on domesticated species was accelerated by the arrival of cattle, sheep, and horses, which allowed people to exploit arid lands they previously had had little use for. These animals made possible a whole new form of human subsistence, one that required some people to become more mobile. They also became an important new form of wealth. Chickens arrived at this time from the south, joining pigs and dogs as other omnivores foraging in human settlements. As we will discuss in the next chapter, societies became much more stratified and unequal in this period. The Longshan period (c. 3000–1800 BCE) saw the rise of large walled towns across much of North China, and the subsequent Bronze Age (2000–500 BCE) saw the rise of East Asia’s first cities and states.40
The society of the Guanzhong dramatically and mysteriously diverged from those of regions to the east over these two millennia. While cities such as Taosi, Erlitou, and Erligang flourished a few hundred kilometers away, the Guanzhong had fewer and smaller settlements than it had had before. This divergence began in the third millennium BCE and grew over time. Its trajectory is hard to date in the Guanzhong because archaeologists have dated most sites according to their ceramics, and it is possible that certain ceramic styles were produced in one region long after new styles had been adopted in others. The city and culture of Erlitou emerged from the Longshan and flourished in the region around Luoyang between 1900 and 1500 BCE while the material culture of the Guanzhong region remained more traditionally Longshan. The powerful state of Erligang subsequently arose farther east. Erligang people seem to have migrated into the eastern Guanzhong after about 1500 BCE, and their culture gradually merged with and displaced local ceramic styles in the western Guanzhong over the following centuries.41
The Guanzhong diverged from its neighbors very slowly. In the third millennium BCE, the population of the Guanzhong remained highest in the Zhouyuan and the gently sloping land south of the Wei River (map 5). Some of these areas had such high densities of settlements that much of the land was probably exploited to some degree. The northeastern quarter of the basin remained sparsely populated, and the high percentage of deer and water buffaloes remains at the sites of Kangjia and Baijia suggests that it was still home to many large wild animals. However, even in those areas people seem to have depended more heavily on farming than earlier peoples had. As in neighboring regions, there is some evidence of increasing inequality in the Longshan-era Guanzhong. This includes evidence of possible human sacrifices and walls built between households that probably served to separate the wealth of individual families. But unlike in areas to the east, there were few large towns in the Guanzhong and no elite goods or rich burials that would indicate socioeconomic stratification. The population declined in the second millennium BCE.42
Map 5. Archaeological sites of the Longshan culture. Each dot indicates an archaeological site identified by archaeologists as belonging to the Longshan culture. Most date to the third millennium BCE, but some sites in the Guanzhong probably date to the early second millennium. The numbers indicate the general locations of ① Fengxi 灃西 and Keshengzhuang 客省莊, ② Dongying 東營, ③ Laoniupo 老牛坡, ④ Jiangzhai 姜寨, ⑤ Kangjia 康家 and Baijiacun 白家村, and ⑥ Taosi 陶寺. I have also included ⑦ the post-Longshan Erlitou 二里頭 site, on the eastern edge of the map. Shuanghuaishu 雙槐樹 is near Erlitou. There are no dots in the top-left corner because we have no map of Longshan culture sites from Gansu.
Tools excavated from sites dated to the third millennium BCE suggest that the trend toward increasing reliance on agriculture continued. In addition to farm tools, most sites had mortars and pestles, bone needles, and spindle whorls. The storage pits excavated at many sites were probably used to store grain. There is little evidence of innovation in agricultural tools, but that does not mean that agricultural practices stayed the same. People undoubtedly continued to experiment with cropping methods, crop varieties, irrigation, and other techniques over the millennia. As we will discuss in the next chapter, early texts reveal that people used fire for both hunting and agricultural land clearance. Third-millennium settlements in some areas of Henan were substantial enough to destroy surrounding vegetation and cause erosion. While we cannot quantify the use of the practices, people were clearly transforming the environments around their settlements with fire and cultivation.43
In additions to millets, people grew rice, wheat, and soybeans. They may have been experimenting with cultivating chenopods and oats. Soybeans seem to have remained a minor crop. Wheat arrived from the west in the third millennium BCE but did not flourish because it was native to the dry summers and wet winters of the Mediterranean. It took millennia for East Asian farmers to develop strains that flourished in their climate, and even then wheat did not become popular until the Han era, when people began milling it to make flour. Millet remained the more reliable choice for farmers worried about crop failure. We know that apricots and peaches were cultivated in this period because they arrived in Central Asia in the early second millennium along with millets and artifacts similar to those of the Yellow River valley. Wild apricot seeds and yellowhorn nuts were excavated from pits in the Guanzhong. Burned wood preserved in soil also reveals the spread of peaches and apricots, and more generally suggests an increase in burning in the second millennium BCE. There is some evidence that increased burning and cultivation caused erosion at this time.44
Hemp had probably been cultivated for millennia by this time, but this is the earliest period for which we have evidence of textiles in the form of impressions on soil and on ceramics. Other plant fibers may also have been used, and people also wore furs and leather as well. The abundance of spindle whorls and fabric impressions on pottery makes clear that cloth was widely used. A boar tusk carved into a shape that resembles a silkworm was excavated from the recently discovered site of Shuanghuaishu, northeast of Luoyang, suggesting that people had already learned to unravel silk cocoons and weave them into cloth.45
Pigs and deer remained the main sources of meat, though very few sites have yielded well-preserved and -studied faunal remains. At the Dongying site the ratio of pigs to deer increased over earlier periods, but sika remained the most common animal at the Kangjia site. Two-thirds of the pigs and sheep at Kangjia were killed before they reached thirty months, and most of the dogs were also killed young, evidence that they were raised by people for meat. Both sites had freshwater mussels, catfish, pheasants, hares, foxes, dogs, cats, water deer, water buffaloes, and cattle. Kangjia also had common carp, swans, Reeves’ turtles, black bears, and tigers, while Dongying had musk deer and sheep. The percentage of large herbivores declined compared to earlier periods. Despite all these animal bones, we should not assume that people ate a lot of meat. Scholars comparing the human remains at Kangjia to those of Yangshao sites found a clear decrease in human stature and possible evidence of anemia, which is caused by malnutrition or chronic parasites. Moreover, there were more missing teeth, more caries, and less tooth wear, all of which suggest that the people ate less meat and more boiled grains and were somewhat malnourished. Although it is a small sample size, it reinforces the general impression that people’s diets became less diverse and nutritious as they came to rely more heavily on grains.46
This finding is not unique to East Asia. As farming people around the world became more sedentary, grew more dependent on grains, and came to live in daily contact with more domesticated mammals, their health often suffered. In particular, a diet centered on grains is not as diverse as the diets of foraging peoples and can cause malnutrition. It also causes caries in teeth, which could be serious problems in a world without dentists. Living in permanent settlements also facilitated the spread of illnesses. Larger populations could support diseases that permanently inhabited human societies, as well as parasites such as roundworms and tapeworms that lived in human digestive tracts. Tuberculosis has been with humans since they left Africa, and a particularly virulent strain developed in Neolithic North China. The arrival of domesticated bovids (cattle, sheep, and goats) probably also increased diseases. Close proximity to animals allowed parasites and diseases such as flu and smallpox to spread between humans and domesticated birds and mammals. Unfortunately, we know little about the early history of other diseases in China, but we do know that later Chinese populations suffered from smallpox, pulmonary diseases such as pneumonia and dysentery, and fever-producing illnesses such as typhoid, typhus, and influenzas. While unpleasant for individuals, diseases gave farming communities an epidemiological edge over foragers. People living in sparsely populated areas were often healthier than those in disease-ridden agricultural societies, especially those with livestock, but when the two societies met the latter’s diseases provided them with a powerful advantage. This is why most people in the Americas and Australia are now the descendants of people from Eurasia and Africa.47
This was the first period from which we have clear evidence of cultural exchange across Eurasia. Cattle, sheep, horses, wheat, and metallurgy all arrived in East Asia during this period and gradually transformed East Asian society. Metallurgy and horses greatly increased the power of the rulers over the ruled, as we will discuss in the following chapter. The animals that more directly affected most people’s lives and the environment were the bovids. Because they were ruminants that evolved to subsist on low-quality plant matter such as grasses, bovids thrived in arid and alpine environments that browsing animals such as deer cannot tolerate. Domesticating them opened whole new landscapes to human exploitation, and people’s herds gradually displaced the native fauna. Because they are social animals, people can herd them, and this created the new social and economic role of herders, people who often spent significant time away from their communities following the fresh pastures. Cattle, sheep, and goats were initially domesticated in West Asia. Along with horses, they were the basis for the pastoral nomadic groups that would soon begin to form on the Eurasian steppe. Cattle and sheep arrived in East Asia as early as the fourth millennium, but they became widespread only after 2000. Chickens arrived in the Yellow River valley toward the end of the second millennium BCE but became widespread only later.48
The incorporation of bovids into people’s subsistence strategies probably had significant social and environmental effects, though these emerged slowly. Cattle can pull loads, and it is possible that people in East Asia were already using them to pull light plows in this period. There is no good evidence of this in China, but people in Mesopotamia had been plowing with oxen since the fourth millennium, and East Asians may well have been familiar with the practice. The most obvious social consequence of the arrival of bovids is that they became an important source of wealth. Since each animal was a source of meat, leather, and, potentially, labor, a herd of them was a valuable possession, which means that grasslands also came to have new value. Cattle gradually replaced pigs as the main sacrificial animals, suggesting that they were regarded as valuable and prestigious animals.49
We do not know if people in China used milk. Cattle and sheep do not produce meat as quickly as pigs, but their milk was appreciated from early times in Europe and Mesopotamia. The peoples of eastern Inner Asia began consuming the milk of cattle and sheep as early as 3000 BCE, and it became a regular part of their diets over the subsequent millennium. The lack of milk products in Chinese diets is often explained by lactose intolerance, but Europeans consumed milk by making reduced-lactose products such as cheese and yogurt even before the genetic mutation arose that allowed them to digest lactose. Likewise, processed milk products are central to the diets of Inner Asian peoples, who are only slightly more lactose-tolerant than Chinese people. It is generally assumed that people in North China adopted dairy only after Inner Asians conquered the region in the first millennium CE. However, the issue may not have been a cultural or biological aversion to dairy but simply a scarcity of bovids in the densely populated Yellow River lowlands.50
Domesticated animals tend to occupy the same habitats as their wild relatives. Because of this, the expansion of domesticated herds reduces the land available for wild animals. The only large wild animals that have thrived despite the spread of their domesticated relatives are wild boar. In contrast, the spread of domesticated cattle, sheep, and horses probably contributed to the extinction of aurochs and wild horses and to the decline in the numbers of many other species. Large herds of grazing animals like cattle and sheep often eat tree seedlings and prevent forests from growing. This meant that after people cut the trees around their settlements, the landscape was more likely to remain treeless. But bovids are much better than deer at subsisting on the poor vegetation that remains after an area has been deforested and overgrazed. They therefore made human societies much more resilient to the environmental degradation that they caused. The somewhat symbiotic relationship that had formed between deer and early agricultural populations faded away as farming and pastoralism displaced deer from the landscape, and from human diets.
The arrival of bovids corresponded to a slight but enduring drying trend in the climate, the end of the mid-Holocene warm period. This surely helped pastoralism become a key subsistence strategy in the arid loess region of North China. The earliest evidence we have of climatic change at this time are climatic fluctuations of the late third millennium BCE that were felt across much of Eurasia. There were huge floods in the Guanzhong at this time, though they did not necessarily affect the areas where most people lived. The urban civilizations of the Yangzi valley mysteriously declined around this time, but societies just to the north flourished, so we must look beyond climatic explanations. The plague spread through other parts of Eurasia in this period, a reminder that there is a long prehistory of disease that scholars are just beginning to discover. Perhaps most importantly, we must consider the relationships between increasingly militarized polities and their neighbors, a topic explored in the next chapter.51
The end of the second millennium BCE was another period of increased climatic instability. Climate records from a cave south of Xi’an reveal both very wet and very dry years at this time. There were also enormous floods, far greater than any recorded in modern times, on the Yellow, Wei, and Jing Rivers. The stratigraphy of the Guanzhong clearly indicates the end of the Holocene megathermal: the dark soils produced by the wetter conditions of the mid-Holocene reverted to beige loess. The transition was not the same across the region, and one well-dated profile shows it occurring many centuries later. Nonetheless, the general drying trend is clear. This was around the time that the Zhou and their allies conquered the Shang, and it is interesting to speculate whether climate played a role in pushing them to do so. The rest of the Zhou period had a climate pretty similar to the modern one, so we will rarely discuss climate in the rest of this book.52
The nature of our evidence changes as we move into the Bronze Age. As archaeologists in China come closer to the era of texts, their priorities switch to a focus on identifying places and events mentioned in historical texts. This means that they focus their attention on excavating cities and tombs, not villages. Urban centers like Erlitou and Erligang have received considerable attention because archaeologists associate them with the Xia and Shang dynasties mentioned in historical texts. In Shaanxi, the Laoniupo site east of Xi’an has clear ties to Erligang, while the Nianzipo site on the upper Jing River has been explored as a possible settlement of the Zhou people before they conquered the Shang.
Only a few sites have been discovered from the second-millennium Guanzhong, and very few have been excavated. They contain an array of tools and implements similar to those of their Longshan predecessors: rectangular stone knives, bone arrowheads and needles, oracle bones, and spindle whorls. There are also a few bronze implements and arrowheads. Laoniupo is the largest and most thoroughly excavated second-millennium site in the Guanzhong. Its strata from the 1450–1220 BCE period contain assemblages of stone knives and hoes, arrowheads, oracle bones, and bone tools. It had far more fish net weights than other contemporary sites. Fish, mollusks, and other aquatic animals seem to have remained important sources of protein for communities near waterways, and people fashioned small fish and turtles of bronze. Bones excavated from the mid- to late second millennium at Nianzipo belonged to cattle, pigs, and dogs, with a smaller number from wild horses, goats, and deer. By the time writing appeared in the late second millennium, the societies of this region were already fully agricultural, though Zhou-era documents make clear that they were still surrounded by a wide variety of wild plants and animals.53
Around 1046 BCE a coalition of peoples from the Guanzhong marched eastward to the North China Plain, conquered the Shang dynasty, and founded the Zhou dynasty. The Zhou ruled from the Guanzhong and Luoyang for almost three centuries (the Western Zhou period, 1046–771). In 771 BCE they were conquered and moved their weakened court eastward to Luoyang, where they hung on as nominal kings for five centuries, a period known as the Eastern Zhou period. The Eastern Zhou was a time of great change, especially its second half, the Warring States period, when both commerce and state power expanded dramatically. Despite the enormous social changes during this period, most farmers continued to use tools of wood, stone, and bone. This section will discuss the plants, followed by the animals of the period and will conclude with its farming methods.
For most of the second millennium BCE there had been far lower densities of people in the Guanzhong than in regions to the east. The founding of the Zhou dynasty transformed the Guanzhong into an important political center and a wealthy and populous agricultural region. Because it had been sparsely populated, the region probably had more natural resources than the more densely populated regions to the east. This was a good reason for the Zhou to move their court back to the Guanzhong after conquering the Shang, though they did establish an administrative center at Luoyang. Soil research shows that erosion began to increase substantially at sites at the eastern end of the Guanzhong Basin around this time, probably caused by the expansion of farming.54
This was the first period for which we have written accounts, which means that we have a substantially different body of evidence than we do for earlier times. While our archaeological evidence for this period consists mostly of tombs, which do not tell us much about subsistence, the Book of Odes, which dates to the first half of the Zhou period, contains abundant references to plants and animals. Zhou society was generally agricultural, but the Odes show that wild plants and animals played an important role in both subsistence and culture. There is no evidence of markets in the Western Zhou period, and people seem to have consumed resources drawn almost entirely from their surrounding areas. The subsequent centuries were to see a profound transformation of society as urbanization, commercialization, and the growth of powerful centralized states transformed the conditions of production for farmers. Unfortunately, we have little material evidence of Zhou-era farming because archaeologists have not excavated and published information on any villages from this period. Even though the technological changes in farming are poorly understood, we can be sure that the incentive structures, and the pressures on farmers, changed profoundly.
Our understanding of this period’s agriculture is different from that of earlier periods before we had texts, which tell us about farming methods and about crops that cannot be preserved archaeologically. Millets remained the staples throughout this period and are by far the most commonly mentioned grains in the Odes. Hemp was grown not only for its fibers but also for its seeds, which were often listed in texts as one of the “five grains.” Soybeans were planted more widely over time, though they were not highly regarded as a food crop. Adzuki and mung beans were also domesticated in East Asia. It is possible that the ability of soybeans to grow in poor soils and improve them by fixing nitrogen led people to plant them more widely as increasing population density led to a reduction in fallow times in the Warring States–Han period. Soybeans were planted as a famine crop in some areas, but perhaps not in the Guanzhong since they are less tolerant of drought than millets. They were not highly regarded because they are difficult to digest. They would not become a popular food until people learned to turn them into sprouts, tofu, and various sauces, most of which occurred after the period covered in this book. Zhou people consumed meat sauces and preserves, and it seems likely that the later development of sophisticated soy-processing methods was partly a response to the decreasing availability of animal protein. Wheat was not widely consumed until the spread during the Han dynasty of milling stones, which allowed people to grind it into flour and make it into breads and noodles, which gradually became staples of the region.55
The Odes are particularly useful because they mention fruits and vegetables that were rarely or never preserved archaeologically. This gives us a window into a variety of species that had probably been cultivated for a long time. People grew several fruits of the Prunus genus, probably including peaches, plums, cherries, and “Japanese apricot.” Hundreds of wild or domesticated apricot seeds were found in a pit in the Zhouyuan, along with seeds of some smaller wild Prunus fruits. The pit may have been treated with fire to ensure dryness, and the dried apricots may have been placed there as fruit for storage. Or perhaps only the seeds were kept, since apricot seeds are edible with some processing. Another pit contained almost two hundred jujube seeds. These were probably stored as fruit since the dried fruit can be stored for long periods and the seeds are inedible. Wild jujube plants have sharp thorns and are widely planted for hedges, while the domesticated one has larger fruits. Both types produce nutritious edible fruits, and the dried fruits are now added to soup and tea for both flavor and medicinal value. As mentioned earlier, the Odes also refer to fruits that were probably some kinds of pears, crab apples, and quince. Gou 枸 may have referred to the “oriental raisin tree” (Hovenia dulcis), whose sweet seed pods are still eaten in the region. Persimmons, one of the most common fruits in the region now, were apparently not widely cultivated until sweet varieties and grafting technologies were developed after the Han dynasty. Mulberries were used both to feed silkworms and for their fruit.56
Nuts were probably an important food source. Chestnuts and hazelnuts are mentioned frequently in the Odes, and chestnuts are still popular in North China. As mentioned above, Neolithic people ate wild walnuts, and people in the Zhou period probably did, too, even though they are not mentioned in the Odes. Wild walnuts are smaller than domesticated ones, which probably arrived in East Asia no earlier than the Han and have since become the most important tree nuts in much of North China. People cultivated a variety of gourds and melons. Bottle gourds (Lagenaria siceraria) are edible but are mainly appreciated because they can be dried to make lightweight watertight containers. They arrived in East Asia from Africa at least 10,000 years ago. Their seeds have been excavated across North China, including in the Zhouyuan pit with the apricots, mentioned above. The pit also contained more than 150 muskmelon seeds (Cucumis melo). Muskmelons are native to Asia. They come in sweet forms that can be eaten as fruit and in less sweet forms that are eaten as vegetables.57
The Odes mention a variety of vegetables. Since archaeologists are unlikely to excavate the seeds of many vegetables, we know almost nothing of their history before written texts appeared. Brassica rapa may have existed in multiple forms at this time, such as turnips, bok choi, and napa cabbage. It would not be surprising if other brassicas, like Chinese cabbage and canola, were also grown at this time. Mallow was also cultivated as a green vegetable. There were not many strong flavors in the cuisine of the time, so we can be sure that chives or green onions played an important culinary role. The numbing Sichuan peppers (Zanthoxylum sp.) were used for flavor long before they were combined with New World chile peppers to create the famous spicy flavor of Sichuan food.58
Many of China’s fruits and vegetables have a long history of domestication about which virtually nothing is known. But there is no question that the first step in domesticating any plant is to discover the useful properties of its wild form, and foraging for wild plants is a common theme in the Odes. Many different wild and domesticated plants are referred to in the Odes, making clear that this was a rural society in which most people were familiar with the characteristics and cultural meanings of a variety of plants. In addition to those mentioned above, a variety of other edible plants are mentioned in the Odes that cannot necessarily be identified with certainty, but have traditionally been identified with edible leafy plants, some of which may have been cultivated. It should also be emphasized that plants and animals have always been used as medicine.59
Plants were also a key source of textiles. People made clothing from skins as well as from the processed and woven fibers of plants, especially hemp. Hemp is mentioned several times in the Odes, including in references to soaking it to loosen the fibers. Rough hemp fabric dated to the Zhou period was excavated in Jingyang, north of Xi’an, and older pieces have been found elsewhere. Hemp remained a common clothing material into the second millennium CE, when it was gradually replaced by cotton. The Odes also contain references to the use of ramie, another textile crop, and kudzu vine, which was used to make shoes and other coarse woven goods. Archaeologists found the impressions of fabric they identified as silk at the site of the Western Zhou capital of Feng-Hao, west of Xi’an. The leaves of mulberry trees are used to feed silkworms, and the mulberry is the most commonly mentioned plant in the Odes. The idea that silk production is the ideal woman’s occupation, as canonized in the Odes and other classical texts, later came to play a major role in cementing ideas of the sexual division of labor in China.60
Woody plants provided people with much of their materials and energy. Most of the wood that people used was burned to cook or to heat their houses. Cutting and collecting wood surely had a substantial impact on the woodlands surrounding human settlements, and firewood scarcity was one of the first consequences of increasing human populations. People employed a wide variety of trees to make implements and build buildings, which were often semi-subterranean with mud walls. Woven shoots, bark, grasses, and vines were used to make many of the basic items in daily use in China from the Paleolithic until the spread of plastic in recent decades. From baskets to bags to fish traps and fences, flexible plant materials were one of the most important raw materials people used. Baskets of various kinds are frequently mentioned in early texts. They were probably made of various materials, including reeds, grasses, vines, and roots. People also wore hats woven from grasses or bamboo, as they still do. Although the use of roofing tiles spread in this period, most Zhou people probably roofed their houses with thatch.61
Excavated bones suggest that much of the meat eaten in the Guanzhong came from pigs, cattle, and sheep. Other excavated animals include horses, buffaloes, sika deer, bears, hares, turtles, carp, mussels, and chickens. Zooarchaeologists have only recently learned to distinguish chickens from wild pheasants, which are fairly common even now, so we still know little about chicken domestication. It may have been similar to that of pigs and dogs in that chickens were initially attracted to human settlements for their food supplies, and people found them useful and integrated them into their communities. Chickens produce meat much more quickly than large mammals, and poorer people eventually came to eat them and their eggs much more often than they ate pigs or cattle.62
As in earlier periods, fish were probably among the most important sources of protein. Because archaeologists have not excavated rural settlements from this period, we lack the examples of fish net weights and other fishing tools that we have for earlier periods. However, the people of the time did make fish out of jade and metal. They also made songs about fish, such as odes that were probably sung to accompany offerings of fish in ancestral temples. The use of nets and fish traps were probably the main fishing methods, though Ode 24 does mention fishing line made of silk. Fish net weights were very common in Neolithic settlements, and, although we have no Zhou domestic sites for comparison, there are various terms for fish nets and traps in the Odes. The traps were probably installed in weirs that channeled fish into traps. These can be built in shallow rivers with nets or by driving a row of sharpened sticks into a river bottom, forming a wall that lets small fish out and channels larger ones toward the trap. As more and more flat, dry land was converted for farming, people increased their exploitation of wetlands, which were scattered along waterways and poorly drained parts of the plains. Elaphures and water deer, both of which specialize in wetlands, were eventually extirpated from the Yellow River valley, and water buffaloes were driven to extinction. People could still catch aquatic creatures such as snails, mussels, and at least three kinds of turtles.63
As in many other societies, the higher one’s status, the more meat one ate. Elites not only had access to more livestock but also hunted large wild animals. As political organizations developed, their leaders came to hunt regularly as a form of military training and to provide flesh to sacrifice to the ancestors. These hunts may have been a significant source of food. The “Lucky Day” ode describes the chariot preparations, the sacrifices before the hunt, the large herds of deer near the Qi and Ju Rivers of the Zhouyuan, and the hunt itself: “We selected our horses there where the animals assemble. The does and stags were in great numbers; by the Qi and the Ju rivers we pursued them, the grounds of the Son of Heaven. Look in the middle of the plain; it is broad and rich in game. They rush, they move, some in groups, some in pairs. We lead all the attendants, in order to please the king. We draw our bows and grasp our arrows; we shoot a small boar and kill a big buffalo.”64
While elites continued to find deer and other large wildlife to hunt, the same was not true of commoners, who had to make do with smaller game. The continuing decline in the ratio of deer bones to those of domesticates is a clear indication of increasingly intense land use by humans, a trend that had been ongoing since the first agricultural societies. Deer were often depicted in Western Zhou artifacts, but this declined in subsequent centuries. Deer became scarce in the lowlands as more and more arable land was being farmed, and much of the other land was used for grazing cattle, sheep, and goats. Just as the numbers of farmers in the lowlands expanded, so did the numbers of herders in regions suitable for grazing.65
Pastoral nomadism continued to expand across arid Inner Asia during the Zhou period. While the Zhou and Qin were traditionally associated with pastoralism because they moved from the Loess Plateau to the north and west of the Guanzhong, in fact they practiced a mix of farming and herding, as did most people in that region. The increasing density of farmers gradually reduced the amount of grazing land in the arable lowlands, but there was always plenty of land on the Loess Plateau for herding.
Let us now turn to farming methods, something that we know a bit more about in this period because of the textual evidence. While a modern farmer would find Zhou-era agriculture primitive, it would have looked quite intensive to a visitor from the Yangshao period. Zhou people had access to a much larger number of domesticated plants and animals than their Yangshao predecessors, which allowed them to make use of a much wider variety of land types. They produced more food in a given space because of a wider variety of crops and improved varieties, along with improved agricultural methods. Although we have a general idea of what plants and animals people employed, we know very little about many key elements of farming, such as fallow time, planting techniques, fertilizer, irrigation, and the point when they began using animals to pull plows. Practices like double-cropping, planting in ridges and furrows, and using fertilizers are first mentioned in Zhou-era texts, but it would be a mistake to take this as evidence that they were either new or widespread. Farming practices differed according to microclimate, soil type, population density, proximity to markets, and many other factors. Historians have cited anecdotal textual evidence to argue that crop yields increased over the thousand years of the Eastern Zhou-Han period. This would not be surprising but remains impossible to prove.66
Irrigation is a topic to which historians have devoted considerable attention, but its origins in China remain a mystery. Small-scale irrigation must have been common among Neolithic rice farmers in the Yangzi valley and may well have been common in the Yellow River valley as well, but it is difficult to find archaeological evidence of it. The earliest evidence of artificial water control in the Guanzhong are moats and ponds dug in the Western Zhou capitals of Feng and Hao, which lay on either side of the Feng River west of Xi’an. A moat over ten meters wide and several meters deep extended for at least four kilometers around Hao. Part of it was dug right through a low area that was already a wetland or a lake and was later the deepest part of the Kunming reservoir, which was created in the Han era. It may have served to drain the area as well as delineate and protect the town. This proves that Western Zhou people were capable of building irrigation infrastructure, but we do not know if they did. Ambiguous evidence of water control is found on an inscribed Western Zhou bronze ritual vessel that records a grant of over three hundred waterways of some kind. They are presumed to be small irrigation or drainage ditches between fields.67
As for fertilizers, the most basic form of fertilizing is fallowing, which consists of letting plants grow on a field and then plowing them into the soil, often after burning. Fallowing is as old as farming, but the first evidence of it comes from an ode that contains the lines “They ply their hoes on the ground, clearing away the sowthistle and smart-weed. These weeds being decayed, the millets grow luxuriantly.” The “Monthly Ordinances” (Yue ling) says that plants killed by summer rains can “be used as a green manure for the fields and pastures and as a fertilizer to enrich the ground.” Similarly, Xunzi wrote of “making frequent applications of manure to fertilize the fields.” While earlier farmers could just leave their fields fallow and burn their vegetation for nutrients, increasing population densities reduced fallow times and forced the farmers to work to improve the quality of their soil. One of the reasons pigs remained important in Chinese farming over the millennia was that their manure provided essential fertilizer.68
Historians of early China have long debated when people began to use livestock to pull plows. Horses were used to pull chariots in the Shang period, but there is no clear evidence of ox-drawn plows in China until they are mentioned in Warring States–era texts. Animal traction is significant because it considerably increases the wealth of those who have cattle compared to those who do not. Cultivating with oxen produces less food from a given acreage than does horticulture but can produce considerably more grain per input of human labor, increasing the incomes of those already wealthy enough to own land. And they can further increase their income by renting their oxen to others. Cattle also enrich fields with their manure and pull wheeled vehicles. As the population grew in the agricultural centers of North China, land overtook labor as the limiting factor in agricultural production, making it cheaper to exploit human labor than to use scarce land for grazing cattle.69
The earliest clear evidence of oxen pulling plows comes from texts of the fifth or fourth century BCE. Early Chinese writings reveal no evidence of ox-drawn plows. Triangular stone implements excavated from Yangzi valley Neolithic sites are often called plowshares, but there were no domesticated bovids to pull them. It is possible that people pulled the plows but more likely that they served some other purpose. Zooarchaeologists have argued that excavated cattle bones show pathologies caused by pulling loads, but this is inconclusive. Archaeologists have also shown that cattle at the Western Zhou capital of Feng were killed at a relatively advanced age, suggesting that they were used for labor. In either case the oxen could have pulled carts, not plows. Until the adoption of the more effective breast-strap harness sometime around the third century BCE, harnesses included a strap around the throat that could easily choke animals when they pulled hard, a significant impediment to the widespread use of animal traction.70
One important clue as to the early Chinese use of oxen is found in an argument made by an official to convince the king of Zhao not to go to war against Qin, its rival: “Qin farms with oxen, and can transport food for her troops by river and provision her crack troops with the harvest from first-grade lands. Her discipline is strict and policies are carried out. We cannot engage her, your majesty.” The state of Qin was spacious, and officials reserved land to support oxen. As we know from its laws, they also lent oxen to farmers. Officials knew that most people lacked access to cattle, so they made cattle available. The practice of including miniature oxen drawing wheeled vehicles in tombs may have originated in Qin during the Warring States period and spread eastward, which also suggests that oxen were more common in Qin. The issue of animal traction in early China has often been discussed as though the issue was whether or not people were familiar with the technology. However, the bigger issue was probably access to oxen and horses. Animals have generally played a much smaller role in East Asian farming than in the Near East or Europe. By the end of our period, populations in the core agricultural areas of the Yellow River valley were high enough that there was little land for cattle, and this is why they were not widely used for farming despite the widespread knowledge of this technology.71
The passage from Xunzi that serves as the epigraph to this chapter exemplifies the North Chinese agricultural system in the third century BCE. Grain came first, followed by fruits and then vegetables, and only then did the text mention animals, which were considerably less important than plants in most people’s diets. By Xunzi’s time there were few large wild animals left in the lowlands of North China. Aurochs, wild horses, and wild water buffaloes eventually went extinct. While the lowlands were densely populated with farmers, mountains and wetlands were still home to a variety of fish, reptiles, birds, and wild plants. This explains the frequent reference in ancient texts to the products of the “mountains and wetlands,” the two types of landscape that could not be easily converted to farms and still provided habitat to wild animals.
Many scholars believe that agricultural productivity increased in the final centuries of the Zhou period, which would not be surprising given the profound social, economic, and political changes. But most people were probably using farming tools similar to those of their Neolithic ancestors, which suggests that the main factors influencing farming were social, not technological. The opportunities created by expanding markets led people to produce cash crops and to grow more food to gain income. At least as important were pressures from states that sought to extract more labor and resources from farmers, forcing them to work harder and grow more food. The increasing power of states over people and environments is the topic of the rest of this book.