Dadiwan is a Neolithic archaeological site located within the upper reaches of the Yellow River near Shaodian in Qi'nan county, Gansu province of the People's Republic of China, on the western Loess Plateau. Dadiwan is an enormous site, covering an area of over a million square meters; excavations to date have uncovered 240 house foundations, 35 pottery kilns, portions of 12 irrigation ditches, 71 tombs, 325 storage/refuse pits, and more than 8000 artifacts and over 17,000 faunal artifacts.
Occupations at Dadiwan
The earliest occupations at Dadiwan date to ~60,000 years ago, with a history that includes the late Pleistocene into the Holocene, from a transition to intensive hunting and gathering to full time millet agriculture.
Radiocarbon dates indicate that a village was located Dadiwan between 5850 and 2950 BC, with substantial occupations of the Dadiwan culture (5850-5350 BC), early Yangshao (4550-3950 BC), later Yangshao (3950-3550 BC), and Banpo (3550-2950 BC) periods. Dadiwan is the site of the earliest appearance of painted pottery, and the earliest site of the Laoguantai cultural tradition, a pre-Yangshao neolithic culture with cord-marked pottery, round houses and a scattered settlement plan.
Neolithic at Dadiwan
The Neolithic is seen in two separate phases between which is a period of about 700 years in which the site is abandoned. Both phases have evidence for domesticated broomcorn millet Panicum miliaceum, but the presence of domesticate millet doesn't imply full agricultural domestication.
Small scale broomcorn and foxtail millet agriculture was established at Dadiwan beginning as early as 8000 cal BP, as a part-time subsistence experiment by hunter-gatherers. Bettinger and colleagues argue that the idea for that experiment took place 300-400 km north of Dadiwan, in north China. By ~7200 BP, millet farming became a full-time, intensive effort.
- Zhuang Lang-Tong Xin (Paleolithic, preagricultural North China microlithic, 32,000-18,000 calBP.
- Phase I: pre-Yangshao, Middle Neolithic), 7800-7300 calBP, incipient agriculture, small amounts of broomcorn millet.
- Phase II: Yanghao/Late Neolithic (Late Banpo) 6500-5900 calBP, intensive and fully-developed millet-based agriculture
Based on stable isotope values of animal bones, researchers believe that during the earliest phase of Neolithic Dadiwan, the people were using a primarily hunting strategy, while by the later phase, a more intensive agricultural system including domestic pig was established at the settlement.
Archaeology at Dadiwan
Dadiwan was first excavated between 1978 and 1984 by teams led by the Cultural Preservation Administration of the Provincial Museum of Gansu and the Dadiwan Excavation Group.
Sources
This glossary entry is part of the Guide to the Neolithic and the Dictionary of Archaeology.
Barton, Loukas, et al. 2009 Agricultural origins and the isotopic identity of domestication in northern China. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.
Bettinger RL, Barton L, and Morgan C. 2010. The origins of food production in north China: A different kind of agricultural revolution. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews 19(1):9-21.
Bettinger RL, Barton L, Morgan C, Chen F, Wang H, Guilderson TP, Ji D, and Zhang D. 2010. The Transition to Agriculture at Dadiwan, People’s Republic of China. Current Anthropology 51(5):703-714.
Yang, Xiaoneng. 2004 Essay 16, Dadiwan Site at Qin'an, Gansu Province. Pp. 44-46, Volume II, Yang, Xiaoneng, ed. Chinese Archaeology in the Twentieth Century: New Perspectives on China's Past. Yale University Press, New Haven.
Zhongpei, Zhang. 2004 The formation of ancient civlization in China. Pp. 77-97, volume I, in Yang, Xiaoneng, ed. Chinese Archaeology in the Twentieth Century: New Perspectives on China's Past. Yale University Press, New Haven.
