Earliest Social Ecology China [ecosystems, groups, stratification]
Brian Lander’s Political Ecology of China, First Farmers to First Empire
Brian Lander wrote:
Seeds of Life: How People Came to Build Their Own Ecosystems
The five grains grow from the soil. If people tend them well then each field will produce several bushels of grain plus a second yearly harvest; and each melon, peach, date and plum plant will yield bushels of fruit; and herbs and the many vegetables will be overflowing; and every cart will have one of the six livestock or wild birds and beasts in it; and if turtles, alligators, fish and eels breed on time then each will become a multitude; and songbirds, ducks and geese will fill the sky like a sea of smoke …. Surely there is surplus enough to feed humanity! —XUNZI, third century BCE
DOMESTICATING PLANTS AND ANIMALS has allowed humans to dominate large areas of the world’s land surface. The alliance between people and grasses lies at the core of our system. We now use huge areas of the earth’s surface to grow wheat, maize, and rice. Similarly, pigs and cattle now constitute almost half of the earth’s mammals by weight. And domesticated species provide us not only with food but also with building materials, medicines, clothes, and companions. Each new tamed or domesticated species can be thought of as a tool in people’s ecological toolboxes. Since each thrives in a different soil and climate, each opened a new environment to human exploitation, allowing people to replace natural ecosystems with ones that they built themselves. The more of the earth that was farmed, the more of the available sunlight and water went to humans, whose population grew. This chapter examines how this process happened in North China.
The history of North China’s agricultural systems is one of increasingly domesticated landscapes. Early Neolithic (i.e., agricultural) peoples grew millets while also fishing, hunting, and foraging for wild plants. As agriculture expanded, people learned to cultivate more plants, raise more animals, and breed them for desired traits. Pigs and dogs foraged around villages, later joined by chickens. Fruit and nut trees could be planted on land too steep to grow grains. Ruminants like cattle and sheep allowed people to exploit grasslands and arid places that they had previously found little use for. As agricultural systems became more sophisticated, people became capable of producing surpluses that could support specialists in craft production, warfare, religion, and administration. Agricultural surpluses were the basis of civilization. By the end of the first millennium BCE, much of the forest and grassland in the lowlands of the Yellow River valley had been replaced by grain fields, vegetable plots, and fruit trees. Wild animals were gradually eliminated from the landscape and from people’s diets …
Early Sedentary Societies, c. 5000–3000 BCE
People of the central Yellow River valley first came to rely heavily on domesticated plants and animals during the fifth and fourth millennia BCE, the time of the Yangshao archaeological culture. This is when people settled in villages and their populations began to grow. Year-round settlements left much more substantial archaeological remains than the seasonal camps of earlier times … The region was one of the most densely settled areas of East Asia at this time … Villages that were home to a few hundred people were scattered across the landscape, leaving plenty of room for wild plants and animals, which remained important in people’s diets.
As people became increasingly sedentary, they were able to collect more things and put more effort into producing them. The quantity and quality of pottery increased. People had previously worn mostly skins and furs, but they began to make more of their textiles from plants like hemp. We know this because sites from this period contain many spindle whorls, which were used to spin fibers into thread.
This period also has the earliest evidence of differences between families in terms of wealth or status. Whereas houses in fifth-millennium-BCE settlements were roughly equal in size, later sites often had one building that was significantly larger and clearly differentiated from other buildings, indicating either that some families achieved a favored status or that buildings were constructed for community activities. There is also evidence from burials that males were beginning to occupy a higher social position than women, which suggests that inequality between the sexes began as soon as material inequalities began to emerge.
The maps of archaeological sites show that Neolithic people tended to concentrate along waterways and avoided plains without running water … Although some of the sites contain thick cultural deposits and seem to have been used repeatedly or perhaps even continuously for centuries, others are shallow and were inhabited briefly. There were undoubtedly still foraging groups who migrated to exploit seasonal resources and whose short-term settlements are unlikely to be found by archaeologists. Even in permanently occupied sites people would not have constantly tilled the same fields. They would have farmed each for a few years and then abandoned it for any number of years before burning it and planting it again. Land was abundant, and the villagers could practice relatively long fallows even while living at a single site, which saved them from having to fertilize the fields.
The early Yangshao sites of Jiangzhai and Banpo, both east of Xi’an, are by far the best-excavated villages in the Guanzhong in any period. Like other villages from this period, they centered on a communal open space surrounded by a ring of houses, around which they dug ditches about five meters deep. These ditches may have served for defense from humans or wild animals and perhaps also as gardens. The division of these villages into several compounds of about the same size suggests that there was little socioeconomic stratification. Banpo was one of the first Chinese Neolithic sites to be extensively excavated, in the 1950s. For decades it was one of the main sites upon which scholars based their analysis of China’s prehistory. Thousands of artifacts were discovered at the site, including ceramics, stone-cutting tools, grinding stones, and various tools made of bone and antler, such as needles and arrowheads. Vessel types included pots used to carry water, tripods placed over fires for cooking, large storage jars, and polished red ware for eating. Cutting tools made of shell and ceramic were probably used to harvest grain. Spindle whorls and impressions of basket weaves on pottery show that people wove various plants into textiles and other objects. People seem to have eaten plenty of fish. Notched stones assumed to be fish net weights were found at many sites, as were bone fishhooks and ceramics with fish painted on them.
Fifteen kilometers northeast of Banpo, the Jiangzhai site consisted of more than sixty houses clustered into five or so groups, four of which clearly had one building larger than the others. These have been interpreted as representing a division of the village into extended family groups. There were some differences of wealth between households as well as indications of economic specialization, both of which suggest that the society was gradually becoming divided into family groups that held wealth privately. Like other contemporary sites, Jiangzhai’s material culture included a variety of stone and bone tools, spindle whorls, and ceramics.
Jiangzhai’s pollen record shows the usual predominance of Artemisia and other herbaceous plants, plus a mix of coniferous and deciduous trees. Ten pollen samples taken from the Lingkoucun site to the east suggest that villagers cleared the woodlands around their settlements. During the four centuries after 5400 BCE, tree pollen at that site declined from an average of 17 percent to 3 percent, while grass pollen rose from an average of 13 percent to 80 percent. The samples from the earlier period include pollen from spruce, fir, pine, hemlock, hazel, birch, oak, elm, hackberry, and wingnut, but only pine was consistently found in the later periods. People probably cleared most of the woods around the site for firewood and land to farm. The percentage of Typha (cattails or bulrushes) also declined over time, which indicates a reduction of wetlands in the area.
Human skeletons from this period were relatively tall and had few physiological deficiencies. They also had well-used teeth with few caries, very different from the teeth of later people who ate lots of boiled grain. All of this suggests that they had a healthy mixed diet composed of both wild and domesticated species. The analysis of isotopes in human bones shows that Yangshao people depended more on millets and pigs than had earlier people. Millets were the main staple of Yangshao villages, but chestnut, hazelnut, pine nut, and hackberry seeds found at Banpo suggest that nuts and fruits were also important. Wild walnuts have been found at other Neolithic sites and may have been gathered in the Guanzhong as well. Nuts are nutritious and durable and were probably an important food source at some times of year. Less palatable nuts, such as acorns, could still provide plenty of food if crops failed. As agricultural populations grew in subsequent millennia, the people cleared forests and their nut trees, reducing the resilience of farming communities to crop failures. There is also evidence that people may have brewed beer at this time.
In these early villages, pigs and dogs wandered freely. Pigs became an inseparable part of human communities at this time, though people still also ate plenty of deer and other animals. Pigs foraged for their own food, cleaned up village refuse, and ate any extra or spoiled crops. The pigs of Neolithic China are the ancestors of China’s indigenous domestic pigs, which early modern Europeans bred with their own hogs to create the breeds now exploited in industrial pig farming globally. People in Henan tended to eat more pigs than their neighbors in the Guanzhong, who ate more wild animals. China’s dogs gradually became smaller. The remarkable similarity of the dogs that roam freely in human communities around the world suggests that there is some evolutionary advantage in that niche for brown dogs that weigh about fifteen kilograms. From this period until recent decades, people, dogs, and pigs have lived together in China, sharing each other’s sounds, smells, and even diseases.
People had already reduced the diversity of wildlife in the plain by this time, but farming villages were still outposts of humanity surrounded by wild spaces. Animals excavated from sites in the Guanzhong Plain include wild sheep (probably argali), wild horses, raccoon dogs, dholes, badgers, hog badgers, hedgehogs, short-faced moles, five kinds of deer (red, sika, musk, water, and roe), as well as pheasants, pelicans, eagles, cranes, carp, soft-shelled turtles, and freshwater snails. This shows that people gathered animal protein from forests, wetlands, and mountains. The contemporaneous site at Dadiwan, in the mountains to the west, included even more diverse wildlife. In addition to those mentioned above, it had leopards, tigers, leopard cats, flying squirrels, rhinoceroses, wild horses, serows, and a single mysterious elephant bone. Most of these animals would once have inhabited the plains (the goatlike serow and argali sheep live only in high mountains), so the absence of these other animals from sites in the Guanzhong Plain was probably due to human activity. Of course, we cannot be sure that animals whose bones were not found in Neolithic sites were absent from the region.
Let us now turn to the fourth millennium BCE, the second half of the Yangshao period. The population continued to grow. Several sites of this period are larger than any earlier site and contain sizeable buildings and rammed-earth walls that suggest growing social stratification and intersettlement violence. In particular, the middle Yangshao Xipo site in Henan and the late Yangshao strata at Dadiwan and at Anban in the western Guanzhong were much larger than other settlements in their regions. They were probably regional centers. All three settlements had one building that was significantly larger than the others, evidence either of growing inequality or of centralized ritual activity.
The trend toward more farming and less hunting continued in the fourth millennium. At Jiangzhai, the percentage of hoes and other farming tools increased to one-third of the total tools found. The quality of these tools also improved, with most stone tools being polished and many having holes drilled through them. New agricultural tools came into use, such as rectangular to semicircular knives of stone and ceramic, along with stone and mussel-shell sickles, both of which were probably used for harvesting grains. As in the early Yangshao, fish net weights and spindle whorls are evidence of string- and cloth-making. There seems to have been a gradual reduction in the number of fish spears, but not net weights. An increased use of nets could indicate that larger fish were becoming less common as fishing pressure increased, making spears less useful than nets. Nets can have a greater impact on fish populations because they catch smaller fish.
Foxtail millet gradually overtook broomcorn millet as the main crop. As millet fields came to occupy larger areas, various disturbance-adapted plants moved into them and became agricultural weeds, most notably wild millets, but also herbs such as purslane, cinquefoil, bedstraw, perilla, chenopods, and knotweed. Chenopods (e.g., lamb’s quarters) and perilla may have been cultivated. Soybeans were a weedy plant that grew around human settlements and produced nutritious seeds. At some point people began to select and plant soybeans with higher levels of oil content, eventually leading to the formation of oilier cultivars. People also planted dry rice, which was a well-established crop in the Yangzi valley by this time, but it required more water than millets and remained a minor crop in the central Yellow River region.
Millets are more than 10 percent protein, but they are low in lysine and other amino acids, so overreliance on them causes malnutrition as well as caries. The poor oral health in the skulls excavated from the mid-Yangshao Xipo site suggests that those people’s diets were overly dependent on grains. That site had a higher population density than any site in the Guanzhong. It is probably not a coincidence that the earliest traces of malnutrition come from the largest settlement of the time.
Growing populations often overexploit resources that could be hunted or foraged, forcing them to rely more heavily on grains, which has been the general dietary trend for most of China’s history. There was also a greater difference in body sizes between males and females at Xipo than at smaller sites, suggesting preferential treatment of boys in situations of food scarcity. Along with the evidence of increasing differences between men’s and women’s tombs mentioned above, we can vaguely discern the formation of gender inequalities. The transition toward a sedentary lifestyle allowed women to have more children, which reduced their mobility and led to a more gendered division of labor by restricting women to work that could be done around the home.
People were continually experimenting with plants and learning to cultivate more of them. Several of the world’s most popular fruits were domesticated in China, but we know little about this history. The archaeological study of plant remains is a fairly new field in China, and archaeologists are more likely to recover plants that were eaten year-round rather than seasonal ones such as fruits. The poems in the first-millennium BCE Book of Odes mention jujubes, a.k.a. Chinese dates (Ziziphus jujuba), and several fruits of the Prunus genus, probably including peaches, apricots, and cherries. The earliest peach stones similar to those of modern domesticated forms were found in lower Yangzi sites of the fourth millennium BCE, and genetic research suggests that cherries were first domesticated around the Sichuan Basin. The Odes also mention various pears or crab apples, as well as Chinese quince, though none of these were necessarily domesticated. Domesticated apples, which are now one of the most common fruits in the region, probably arrived in China from Central Asia sometime in the past two millennia. We can be sure that future research will reveal a long history of fruit cultivation in North China. Cultivating fruit and nut trees allows people to cultivate sloping land unsuitable for farming and to plant trees far from their homes that they need visit only at harvest time.
Just as people’s dependence on cultivated plants increased in this period, the ratio of domesticated animals to wild ones also increased. This was especially clear at large sites such as Xipo, where pigs constituted over four-fifths of animal remains. Pigs and sika deer remained the most common animals at most sites in the Guanzhong. In addition to those, the Dongying site contained remains of aurochs, wild water buffaloes, water and musk deer, badgers, cats, and wild sheep. It was not until the arrival of domesticated sheep and cattle in the subsequent Longshan period that domesticated animals mostly replaced wild ones in people’s diets.
As agriculture occupied more of the landscape, various plants and animals came to inhabit it. Weeds and insects flourished in farmed fields, as did hedgehogs, hares, and hamsters. Rodents such as mice and rats took advantage of all the food in settlements. Sparrows, pigeons, and other birds specialized in eating agricultural crops and their insect pests. Bats and swallows learned to roost in buildings, perfect locations from which to hunt the many insects that flew around villages. Domesticated cats had not yet arrived in China from Southwest Asia, but wild cats frequented human settlements to hunt all these small animals. Farming villages were becoming their own ecosystems.
Agricultural societies were expanding, as was their environmental impact. Systematic archaeological surveys in western Henan revealed that there were larger and more numerous settlements during the middle Yangshao period than at any other time in the Neolithic. They also showed that the most densely populated areas were later abandoned, possibly due to environmental degradation. Similarly, studies of sedimentation in the lower Yellow River show that it was about this time that erosion began to increase in North China, at least partly caused by human activity. There is also local evidence that farmers in the Guanzhong began to transform soils by adding organic materials and mineral grains. The late Yangshao was probably the period of greatest population density and site size in the Guanzhong before the Bronze Age.
The Rise of Complex Societies, c. 3000–1046 BCE
The pace of change accelerated after 3000 BCE. The use of oracle bones for divination became widespread, multiroom buildings became increasingly common, ceramic technology continued to improve, and metallurgy arrived from Inner Asia. The trend toward increased reliance on domesticated species was accelerated by the arrival of cattle, sheep, and horses, which allowed people to exploit arid lands they previously had had little use for. These animals made possible a whole new form of human subsistence, one that required some people to become more mobile. They also became an important new form of wealth. Chickens arrived at this time from the south, joining pigs and dogs as other omnivores foraging in human settlements …
[MGH: readers may wish to note that the most recent theory about the global origins of chickens was published just 6 days ago: “biocultural origins of domestic chickens”.]
… [S]ocieties became much more stratified and unequal in this period. The Longshan period (c. 3000–1800 BCE) saw the rise of large walled towns across much of North China, and the subsequent Bronze Age (2000–500 BCE) saw the rise of East Asia’s first cities and states …
The Guanzhong diverged from its neighbors very slowly. In the third millennium BCE, the population of the Guanzhong remained highest in the Zhouyuan and the gently sloping land south of the Wei River. Some of these areas had such high densities of settlements that much of the land was probably exploited to some degree. The northeastern quarter of the basin remained sparsely populated, and the high percentage of deer and water buffaloes remains at the sites of Kangjia and Baijia suggests that it was still home to many large wild animals. However, even in those areas people seem to have depended more heavily on farming than earlier peoples had. As in neighboring regions, there is some evidence of increasing inequality in the Longshan-era Guanzhong. This includes evidence of possible human sacrifices and walls built between households that probably served to separate the wealth of individual families. But unlike in areas to the east, there were few large towns in the Guanzhong and no elite goods or rich burials that would indicate socioeconomic stratification. The population declined in the second millennium BCE.
Tools excavated from sites dated to the third millennium BCE suggest that the trend toward increasing reliance on agriculture continued. In addition to farm tools, most sites had mortars and pestles, bone needles, and spindle whorls. The storage pits excavated at many sites were probably used to store grain. There is little evidence of innovation in agricultural tools, but that does not mean that agricultural practices stayed the same. People undoubtedly continued to experiment with cropping methods, crop varieties, irrigation, and other techniques over the millennia. As we will discuss in the next chapter, early texts reveal that people used fire for both hunting and agricultural land clearance. Third-millennium settlements in some areas of Henan were substantial enough to destroy surrounding vegetation and cause erosion. While we cannot quantify the use of the practices, people were clearly transforming the environments around their settlements with fire and cultivation …
… The percentage of large herbivores declined compared to earlier periods. Despite all these animal bones, we should not assume that people ate a lot of meat. Scholars comparing the human remains at Kangjia to those of Yangshao sites found a clear decrease in human stature and possible evidence of anemia, which is caused by malnutrition or chronic parasites. Moreover, there were more missing teeth, more caries, and less tooth wear, all of which suggest that the people ate less meat and more boiled grains and were somewhat malnourished … Living in permanent settlements also facilitated the spread of illnesses … People living in sparsely populated areas were often healthier than those in disease-ridden agricultural societies, especially those with livestock, but when the two societies met the latter’s diseases provided them with a powerful advantage …
This was the first period from which we have clear evidence of cultural exchange across Eurasia. Cattle, sheep, horses, wheat, and metallurgy all arrived in East Asia during this period and gradually transformed East Asian society. Metallurgy and horses greatly increased the power of the rulers over the ruled … The animals that more directly affected most people’s lives and the environment were the bovids. Because they were ruminants that evolved to subsist on low-quality plant matter such as grasses, bovids thrived in arid and alpine environments that browsing animals such as deer cannot tolerate. Domesticating them opened whole new landscapes to human exploitation, and people’s herds gradually displaced the native fauna. Because they are social animals, people can herd them, and this created the new social and economic role of herders, people who often spent significant time away from their communities following the fresh pastures. Cattle, sheep, and goats were initially domesticated in West Asia. Along with horses, they were the basis for the pastoral nomadic groups that would soon begin to form on the Eurasian steppe. Cattle and sheep arrived in East Asia as early as the fourth millennium, but they became widespread only after 2000. Chickens [discussion] arrived in the Yellow River valley toward the end of the second millennium BCE but became widespread only later …
… The most obvious social consequence of the arrival of bovids is that they became an important source of wealth. Since each animal was a source of meat, leather, and, potentially, labor, a herd of them was a valuable possession, which means that grasslands also came to have new value. Cattle gradually replaced pigs as the main sacrificial animals, suggesting that they were regarded as valuable and prestigious animals.
… Large herds of grazing animals like cattle and sheep often eat tree seedlings and prevent forests from growing. This meant that after people cut the trees around their settlements, the landscape was more likely to remain treeless. But bovids are much better than deer at subsisting on the poor vegetation that remains after an area has been deforested and overgrazed. They therefore made human societies much more resilient to the environmental degradation that they caused. The somewhat symbiotic relationship that had formed between deer and early agricultural populations faded away as farming and pastoralism displaced deer from the landscape, and from human diets.
The arrival of bovids corresponded to a slight but enduring drying trend in the climate, the end of the mid-Holocene warm period. This surely helped pastoralism become a key subsistence strategy in the arid loess region of North China. The earliest evidence we have of climatic change at this time are climatic fluctuations of the late third millennium BCE that were felt across much of Eurasia. There were huge floods in the Guanzhong at this time, though they did not necessarily affect the areas where most people lived. The urban civilizations of the Yangzi valley mysteriously declined around this time, but societies just to the north flourished, so we must look beyond climatic explanations. The plague spread through other parts of Eurasia in this period, a reminder that there is a long prehistory of disease that scholars are just beginning to discover. Perhaps most importantly, we must [later] consider the relationships between increasingly militarized polities and their neighbors …
The end of the second millennium BCE was another period of increased climatic instability … [T]he general drying trend is clear. This was around the time that the Zhou and their allies conquered the Shang, and it is interesting to speculate whether climate played a role in pushing them to do so. The rest of the Zhou period had a climate pretty similar to the modern one …
The Zhou Period, 1046–221 BCE
Around 1046 BCE a coalition of peoples from the Guanzhong marched eastward to the North China Plain, conquered the Shang dynasty, and founded the Zhou dynasty. The Zhou ruled from the Guanzhong and Luoyang for almost three centuries (the Western Zhou period, 1046–771). In 771 BCE they were conquered and moved their weakened court eastward to Luoyang, where they hung on as nominal kings for five centuries, a period known as the Eastern Zhou period. The Eastern Zhou was a time of great change, especially its second half, the Warring States period, when both commerce and state power expanded dramatically. Despite the enormous social changes during this period, most farmers continued to use tools of wood, stone, and bone …
… This was the first period for which we have written accounts, which means that we have a substantially different body of evidence than we do for earlier times. While our archaeological evidence for this period consists mostly of tombs, which do not tell us much about subsistence, the Book of Odes, which dates to the first half of the Zhou period, contains abundant references to plants and animals. Zhou society was generally agricultural, but the Odes show that wild plants and animals played an important role in both subsistence and culture. There is no evidence of markets in the Western Zhou period, and people seem to have consumed resources drawn almost entirely from their surrounding areas. The subsequent centuries were to see a profound transformation of society as urbanization, commercialization, and the growth of powerful centralized states transformed the conditions of production for farmers. Unfortunately, we have little material evidence of Zhou-era farming because archaeologists have not excavated and published information on any villages from this period. Even though the technological changes in farming are poorly understood, we can be sure that the incentive structures, and the pressures on farmers, changed profoundly …
… As in many other societies, the higher one’s status, the more meat one ate. Elites not only had access to more livestock but also hunted large wild animals. As political organizations developed, their leaders came to hunt regularly as a form of military training and to provide flesh to sacrifice to the ancestors. These hunts may have been a significant source of food. The “Lucky Day” ode describes the chariot preparations, the sacrifices before the hunt, the large herds of deer near the Qi and Ju Rivers of the Zhouyuan, and the hunt itself: “We selected our horses there where the animals assemble. The does and stags were in great numbers; by the Qi and the Ju rivers we pursued them, the grounds of the Son of Heaven. Look in the middle of the plain; it is broad and rich in game. They rush, they move, some in groups, some in pairs. We lead all the attendants, in order to please the king. We draw our bows and grasp our arrows; we shoot a small boar and kill a big buffalo”.
While elites continued to find deer and other large wildlife to hunt, the same was not true of commoners, who had to make do with smaller game. The continuing decline in the ratio of deer bones to those of domesticates is a clear indication of increasingly intense land use by humans, a trend that had been ongoing since the first agricultural societies. Deer were often depicted in Western Zhou artifacts, but this declined in subsequent centuries. Deer became scarce in the lowlands as more and more arable land was being farmed, and much of the other land was used for grazing cattle, sheep, and goats. Just as the numbers of farmers in the lowlands expanded, so did the numbers of herders in regions suitable for grazing.
Pastoral nomadism continued to expand across arid Inner Asia during the Zhou period. While the Zhou and Qin were traditionally associated with pastoralism because they moved from the Loess Plateau to the north and west of the Guanzhong, in fact they practiced a mix of farming and herding, as did most people in that region. The increasing density of farmers gradually reduced the amount of grazing land in the arable lowlands, but there was always plenty of land on the Loess Plateau for herding …
… Historians of early China have long debated when people began to use livestock to pull plows. Horses were used to pull chariots in the Shang period, but there is no clear evidence of ox-drawn plows in China until they are mentioned in Warring States–era texts. Animal traction is significant because it considerably increases the wealth of those who have cattle compared to those who do not. Cultivating with oxen produces less food from a given acreage than does horticulture but can produce considerably more grain per input of human labor, increasing the incomes of those already wealthy enough to own land. And they can further increase their income by renting their oxen to others. Cattle also enrich fields with their manure and pull wheeled vehicles. As the population grew in the agricultural centers of North China, land overtook labor as the limiting factor in agricultural production, making it cheaper to exploit human labor than to use scarce land for grazing cattle.
The earliest clear evidence of oxen pulling plows comes from texts of the fifth or fourth century BCE. Early Chinese writings reveal no evidence of ox-drawn plows. Triangular stone implements excavated from Yangzi valley Neolithic sites are often called plowshares, but there were no domesticated bovids to pull them. It is possible that people pulled the plows but more likely that they served some other purpose. Zooarchaeologists have argued that excavated cattle bones show pathologies caused by pulling loads, but this is inconclusive. Archaeologists have also shown that cattle at the Western Zhou capital of Feng were killed at a relatively advanced age, suggesting that they were used for labor. In either case the oxen could have pulled carts, not plows. Until the adoption of the more effective breast-strap harness sometime around the third century BCE, harnesses included a strap around the throat that could easily choke animals when they pulled hard, a significant impediment to the widespread use of animal traction.
One important clue as to the early Chinese use of oxen is found in an argument made by an official to convince the king of Zhao not to go to war against Qin, its rival:
“Qin farms with oxen, and can transport food for her troops by river and provision her crack troops with the harvest from first-grade lands. Her discipline is strict and policies are carried out. We cannot engage her, your majesty”.
The state of Qin was spacious, and officials reserved land to support oxen. As we know from its laws, they also lent oxen to farmers. Officials knew that most people lacked access to cattle, so they made cattle available. The practice of including miniature oxen drawing wheeled vehicles in tombs may have originated in Qin during the Warring States period and spread eastward, which also suggests that oxen were more common in Qin. The issue of animal traction in early China has often been discussed as though the issue was whether or not people were familiar with the technology. However, the bigger issue was probably access to oxen and horses. Animals have generally played a much smaller role in East Asian farming than in the Near East or Europe. By the end of our period, populations in the core agricultural areas of the Yellow River valley were high enough that there was little land for cattle, and this is why they were not widely used for farming despite the widespread knowledge of this technology.
The passage from Xunzi that serves as the epigraph to this chapter exemplifies the North Chinese agricultural system in the third century BCE. Grain came first, followed by fruits and then vegetables, and only then did the text mention animals, which were considerably less important than plants in most people’s diets. By Xunzi’s time there were few large wild animals left in the lowlands of North China. Aurochs, wild horses, and wild water buffaloes eventually went extinct. While the lowlands were densely populated with farmers, mountains and wetlands were still home to a variety of fish, reptiles, birds, and wild plants. This explains the frequent reference in ancient texts to the products of the “mountains and wetlands”, the two types of landscape that could not be easily converted to farms and still provided habitat to wild animals.
Many scholars believe that agricultural productivity increased in the final centuries of the Zhou period, which would not be surprising given the profound social, economic, and political changes. But most people were probably using farming tools similar to those of their Neolithic ancestors, which suggests that the main factors influencing farming were social, not technological. The opportunities created by expanding markets led people to produce cash crops and to grow more food to gain income. At least as important were pressures from states that sought to extract more labor and resources from farmers, forcing them to work harder and grow more food. The increasing power of states over people and environments is the topic of the rest of this book …
The Source:
Brian Lander, The King’s Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire, Yale University Press 2021
[MGH: Highly recommended introduction to China’s early ecological interactions. Extracts from 3 sections of Chapter 2, and there is much more there to enjoy and learn]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.