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<p>This study reconstructs low-level food production practices in North China (12,000–7000&#xa0;cal BP) by integrating bioarchaeological, settlement, and artifact assemblage data. We document a shift from mobile foraging to nucleated semi-sedentary/sedentary villages, accompanied by diversified resource use, early millet/rice cultivation, technological innovations, and emergent social integration strategies. Applying a multidimensional diagnostic framework, we identify divergent regional trajectories after 7000&#xa0;cal BP. In southern North China, communities adopted intensive millet agriculture at different rates, whereas populations in the north either continued low-level food production or experienced only limited agricultural intensification. Our analysis demonstrates that low-level food production constituted a distinct socioeconomic system rather than a transitional stage. This system contained both facilitative mechanisms promoting agricultural intensification and constraining mechanisms that delayed or inhibited it. These mechanisms interacted with local environmental circumstances and social contexts to generate heterogeneous socioeconomic trajectories. This challenges unilinear modes of agricultural evolution and underscores the co-evolution of technological, social and environmental factors in early food-producing societies.</p>

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Low-level Food Production in Neolithic North China: Organizational Patterns and Divergent Pathways

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年6月27日

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  • Chao Zhao,
  • John P. Walden,
  • Loukas Barton,
  • Jincheng Wu

摘要

This study reconstructs low-level food production practices in North China (12,000–7000 cal BP) by integrating bioarchaeological, settlement, and artifact assemblage data. We document a shift from mobile foraging to nucleated semi-sedentary/sedentary villages, accompanied by diversified resource use, early millet/rice cultivation, technological innovations, and emergent social integration strategies. Applying a multidimensional diagnostic framework, we identify divergent regional trajectories after 7000 cal BP. In southern North China, communities adopted intensive millet agriculture at different rates, whereas populations in the north either continued low-level food production or experienced only limited agricultural intensification. Our analysis demonstrates that low-level food production constituted a distinct socioeconomic system rather than a transitional stage. This system contained both facilitative mechanisms promoting agricultural intensification and constraining mechanisms that delayed or inhibited it. These mechanisms interacted with local environmental circumstances and social contexts to generate heterogeneous socioeconomic trajectories. This challenges unilinear modes of agricultural evolution and underscores the co-evolution of technological, social and environmental factors in early food-producing societies.