Project

Landscape Management and Subsistence Strategies of the Proto-Silk Road

Program

Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Program in China Studies Predissertation-Summer Travel Grants

Department

Anthropology

Abstract

Extensive movements of populations during the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze age in Northwest China brought with them technologies from West Asia that had widespread impact across East Asia. This study contributes to this scholarship, by reconstructing changing subsistence strategies and landscape management in Northwest China during these periods of substantial cross-cultural exchange. Employing archaeobotanical techniques alongside organic residue and spatial analyses, this study argues that these cross-cultural interactions gave rise to landscape management techniques that had far-reaching effects. This data set allows us to visualize environmental stressors as well as changes in landscape management, in particular management of agricultural, woodland and wetland environments.