Abstract
This article examines the abundant marine mollusc, and fish remains at the Jingtoushan shell midden (8,300 to 7,800 cal a BP) in Zhejiang Province, China, to investigate the fishing economy, community development, the palaeoenvironment, and their interactions among the prehistoric populations in the lower Yangtze River Basin and southeastern coastal China. It also attempts to explore the prosperity and decline of coastal settlements in China during the Neolithic Age and the potential reasons for their rise and fall, respectively. Based on the ecological and biological principles of marine animals, standard zooarchaeological methods and radiocarbon dating analysis are used for sampling, identification, measurement, and quantification. Results show that at least 11 mollusc taxa and 14 fish taxa can be identified from the Jingtoushan faunal assemblage. The ancient Jingtoushan residents possibly lived in a settlement close to the coast and engaged in inshore and offshore fishing, hunting, and gathering as their primary subsistence strategies, with low-level rice cultivation as a supplementary means of sustenance. Eventually, the changes in the coastal environment could be one of the reasons why the Jingtoushan residents abandoned their settlement. The research contributes to Chinese Neolithic archaeology with new evidence of the exploitation of marine resources around 8000 a BP in the eastern coastal areas and the relationship between Neolithic community development and environmental changes.
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Acknowledgements
We sincerely thank the Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology for supporting this study. We thank the supervisors from the Australian National University for their help in writing this paper. We thank Prof. Shenglong Zhao, Mr. Jian Chen and Mr. Xingle Guo from Zhejiang Ocean University for providing reference collections of marine animals and their help in identification. We thank Prof. Xiaoguo Yu, Dr. Liming Ye, and Dr. Weijia Fan from the Second Institute of Oceanography, MNR, for their comments on the radiocarbon dating results. We thank Prof. Haiyan Wang and her team from the Institute of Oceanography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, for their help on oyster morphology and identification. We thank Prof. Guoqiang Xiao from the Zhejiang Mariculture Research Institute for his help on mollusc identification. We thank Mr. Yuhao Tong from the University of Melbourne for his help in the identification of the chondrichthyan fish. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on this paper. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. T2192950).
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Wu, E., Sun, G. & Zhang, Y. Feeding prehistoric coastal community: A study of marine faunal remains at the Jingtoushan site. Sci. China Earth Sci. 67, 1574–1590 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-023-1257-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-023-1257-8