Continuity and Local Evolution in the Neolithic of South China: A Non-Nuclear Approach [and Comments and Reply

Abstract

The Neolithic of South China (and of the Far East generally) has traditionally been reconstructed on nuclear-diffusionist models; chronologies and local culture sequences in South China have been related to the rise of agriculture and Neolithic technology in North China, and their subsequent spread into the South, often seen to have resulted from a movement of peoples out of the "nuclear area." Recent data now suggest a generally contemporaneous though largely autonomous development of agriculture, pottery, polished stone tools, and boat transport within South China, beginning in the Pleistocene-Holocene transition and marked by technological continuity with gradually crystallizing local "Bacsonian" subcultures after ca. 8000 B.C. The Middle Neolithic "Lungshanoid" and "Yueh" horizons of the Yangtze Delta and southern coast, respectively, are suggested to have emerged (possibly with a significant stimulus from the changing land-sea configuration in the early Holocene) by the 6th or 5th millennium B.C. and themselves provided the substrata from which the Geometric horizon of Southeast China evolved in the late 3d-early 2d millennium B.C. In the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, an assumed local evolution and parallel development over the wide region constitutes the most appropiate theoretical model with which to frame the data, and leads generally to more productive lines of investigation (e.g., man-land relationships, prior cultural-technological history, potential within the cultures themselves for innovation) than do other a priori models. The assumption of a locally evolving cultural system has proved highly useful and predictively successful in its application to Neolithic development in the Yellow River Basin of North China, the Red River Basin and contiguous zones in North Vietnam, Japan, and certain key sites in South China. With the now known or strongly suspected antiquity of a number of culture traits (rice, painted pottery, rectangular adze) wide-spread over South China and beyond, and the futility in attempting to pinpoint their precise point of origin, it is suggested that such a framework will eventually find wide application over the mainland of East Asia.