Pengtoushan culture
Culture | Defunct
7500 BCE to 6100 BCE
The Pengtoushan culture, dated 7500–6100 BCE, is a Neolithic culture centered primarily around the central Yangtze River region in northwestern Hunan, China.
It is roughly contemporaneous with its northern neighbor, the Peiligang culture.
The two primary examples of Pengtoushan culture are the type site at Pengtoushan and the later site at Bashidang.The type site at Pengtoushan was discovered in Li County, Hunan.
This site is the earliest permanently settled village yet discovered in China.
Excavated in 1988, Pengtoushan has been difficult to date accurately, with a large variability in dates ranging from 9000 BCE to 5500 BCE.
Cord-marked pottery was discovered among the burial goods.Analysis of Chinese rice residues which were Carbon-14 dated to 8200-7800 BCE show that rice had been domesticated by this time.
The size of the Pengtoushan rice was larger than the size of naturally occurring wild rice; however, Pengtoushan lacked evidence of tools used in cultivating rice.
Although not found at Pengtoushan, rice-cultivating tools were found in later sites associated with the Pengtoushan culture.
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Over seventy sites have been identified with the Peiligang culture, a name given by archaeologists to a group of Neolithic communities in the Yi-Luo river basin in Henan Province, China, named after the site discovered in 1977 at Peiligang (in Xinzheng county).
The site at Jiahu, dating to around 7000, is one of the earliest sites associated with this culture, which practices agriculture in the form of cultivating millet and animal husbandry in the form of raising pigs.
Archaeologists think that the Peiligang culture, one of the first in China to make pottery, was egalitarian, with little political organization.
Evidence of the earliest rice cultivation in the Yellow River basin comes from carbonized rice grains from the Yuezhuang site in Jinan, Shandong.
The carbonized rice is dated using AMS radiocarbon dating to 7050±80.
Archaeologists also excavated millet from the Yuezhuang site.