Li, Chunxia;
Cao, Yanpeng;
Zhang, Chi;
Qin, Ling;
Deng, Zhenhua;
Chen, Yan;
Zhu, Shuzheng;
... Zhuang, Yijie; + view all
(2023)
Earliest ceramic drainage system and the formation of hydro-sociality in monsoonal East Asia.
Nature Water
10.1038/s44221-023-00114-4.
(In press).
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Abstract
The earliest ceramic drainage system unearthed at the Pingliangtai site on the Central Plains of China represents an unprecedented social and environmental manipulation as societies faced surging environmental crises in the Late Holocene East Asian Monsoon region. Here we present results of excavation and a geoarchaeological survey of the water-management infrastructures and environment which reveal the operation and maintenance of a well-planned and regulated two-tiered drainage system. Rather than a ‘centralized hierarchy’, the drainage activities were mainly practised at household and communal levels, through which Pingliangtai society was drawn to more pragmatic aspects of social governance. Through their emphasis on spatial uniformity, cooperation in public affairs, and a series of technological innovations, water management at Pingliangtai gravitated to collective shared interest as the society responded to recurrent environmental contingencies. Such a pragmatic focus on public affairs constituted a previously unrecognized, alternative pathway to the development of power structure and social governance on the Central Plains regimes in late Neolithic and later times.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Earliest ceramic drainage system and the formation of hydro-sociality in monsoonal East Asia |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s44221-023-00114-4 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-023-00114-4 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Institute of Archaeology UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Institute of Archaeology > Institute of Archaeology Gordon Square |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10175539 |
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