The middle Yangtze River valley of China was home to 20 or so Neolithic earthen walled towns dated between 6000 and 4200 cal BP, which is very rare in East Asia. Many scholars consider these walled towns to be the key to understanding the origin of civilizations in the Yangtze River valley and agree on a strong correlation between the emergence and development of walled towns and the economic, socio-political, and ideological integration on the regional scale. However, few efforts have been made to explain how, in what circumstances, and to what extent the two variables were correlated. Archaeological interpretation on this subject requires data carefully collected across different scales of space and must involve site-to-site comparisons.
This collection presents our efforts toward this goal, using multiple lines of data (environmental changes, residential patterning, plant and animal use, pottery production and use, and lithic tool function and use-pattern) collected from various methods and techniques (e.g., plant and bone identification, chemical and mineralogical compositional analysis of ceramics, GIS analysis of settlements, and micro-use wear, residue and technico-functional analysis of stone tools). Environmental, economic, sociopolitical, and ideological factors and their potential impacts on the formation and development of social complexity in the middle Yangtze River valley are evaluated by a synthetic approach for the first time.
Articles in this collection focus on two walled towns in the middle Yangtze River valley, which are identified at the Zoumaling site in Shishou City and the Fenghuangzui site in Xianyang City. The two sites are enlisted among the Hubei Provincial Archaeological Site Parks in 2022 and 2023, respectively. Archaeological data from the two towns are comparable in many aspects. They offer important clues for the reconstruction of past human actions and thoughts and make contributions to stimulating local heritage tourism and economic growth.
