I explore how heterogeneous lowland populations were reorganized after collapse, how a new collective identity was created through ritual and religious performance at the household level at Erlitou, and how Erlitou’s ideologies, political system, and economic network were shaped by the upland polities and societies. Following the shift in “archaic states” studies from identifying “what” to investigating “how,” I focus on the strategies, institutions, and relations that undergirded and sustained the Erlitou secondary state. This put an end to the lowland states of the Longshan period (2400–1900 BC) and provided the context for the constitution of the Erlitou secondary state (1900–1500 BC).
#JIASHAN YAO ZHUANG IRON CASTING FOUNDRY SERIES#
Synthesizing the latest archaeological discoveries, I show that a series of successive declines, beginning around 2000 BC, took place throughout lowland China. This article builds on recent archaeological theorizing about early complex societies to analyze the political anthropology of Neolithic and Bronze Age China in a culture-specific trajectory over the longue durée. In sum, the complex societies with high stratification and hierarchies were more vulnerable to abrupt climate events than low stratified societies open to exchanges during the middle to late Holocene. The diverse response and resilience of human societies to the 4.2 ka event has been attributed to both climatic anomalies and cultural exchange across different regions.
Our study reveals that drought-induced enlargement of farmland and trans-Eurasian cultural exchange promoted the sustainability of millet agriculture and population in NW China, and combined effects of cooling and flooding events and social crises caused a decline in rice agriculture and population in SE China. This pattern coincided with the prosperity and breakdown of millet and rice agricultures contemporaneously, respectively. Regional populations show an antipodal pattern of boom in north and northwest (NW) and bust in south and southeast (SE) China during 4300–3500 cal a BP. Here using a newly database of radiocarbon dates and archaeobotanical data spanning the Neolithic-Bronze Age from different regions in China, we address the response and resilience of demography and agriculture to the 4.2 ka event. Long-term interaction between regional demography and millet-rice agriculture in China provide a unique opportunity to study this issue. The response of population and agriculture to abrupt climate events remains a matter of heated debates, especially the societal collapses related to the 4.2 ka event.
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