Prolonged landscape stability sustained the continuous development of ancient civilizations in the Shuangji River valley of China's Central Plains

Abstract

The continuous development of the Neolithic to Bronze-Age cultures on China's Central Plains is well contested by archaeological and historical research. Environmental factors that sustained such an exceptionally long cultural continuity are, however, poorly understood. The evolution of fluvial landscapes and its relationship with cultural developments are key to disentangle the close interaction between the environment and civilizational discourse on the Central Plains. Here, we present OSL and AMS 14C ages and other environmental data collected from a range of typical geomorphological locations in the Shuangji River valley, which is situated at the heartland of the Central Plains and long considered to be one of the most important regions for the rise of the Chinese civilization. Combining the OSL and 14C dates, results of particle size and soil/sediment micromorphological analyses, and geoarchaeological field observations, we reconstructed the evolution of Holocene geomorphological landscape in the Shuangji River valley. The results show that the Neogene alluvial fan was incised into a wide valley during the early Pleistocene. Subsequent alluvial processes were constrained within this general framework of regional landform. The period of 20 ka BP and 10–8 ka BP saw two episodes of basin-scale alluvial incision, which created two alluvial terraces (i.e., T4 and T3), respectively. Despite the occurrence of episodic floods and some large-scale alluvial siltation during 8–3 ka BP, the alluvial surfaces remained stable for a prolonged period of time and thus provided optimal living conditions for prehistoric inhabitation. We argue that the geomorphological foundation and prolonged landscape stability were instrumental to the continuous cultural developments on the Central Plains as seen in the Shuangji River valley as a representative of such long-term human-environment interactions. Our geoarchaeological survey for the first time reveals basin-scale evidence on the mechanism responsible for this distinctive relationship between alluvial landscape and cultural development, in which the terrace-surface stability, alongside many other cultural factors, profoundly shaped the celebrated cultural continuity on prehistoric Central Plains.