The Neolithic of Southeast China: Cultural Transformation and Re ...

Plant remains have not been noted until my own excavation at the Huangguashan site. Although many people have argued that there was an agricultural economy in the Neolithic Southeast China, their contentions are essentially assumptions without direct evidence.

3. Social organization: The discovery of the three cemeteries at the Tanshishan site, the Zhuangbianshan site, and the Xitou site has provided data for analyzing the organization of their societies. The arguments made by Chinese archaeologists are confined to paradigms such as patrilineal or matrilineal societies, a Marxist framework that has become the dominant theory in China since 1950.

4. The causes of the cultural change in Southeast China‘s Neolithic: Despite the weakness of available archaeological data to substantiate any rigorous theories on the causes of cultural change, a number of hypotheses have been espoused. Based on the factors identified as the change mechanism, we can distinguish the theories into two schools. I shall term them as “exogenous school” and “endogenous school.” The exogenous school views changes as operations that first happened outside the area, and later were brought or diffused into the societies in Southeast China through either direct population movement or regional interaction. The representative proponent of this theory is K. C. Chang who used the term “Lungshanoid” (Longshannoid) to explain the cultural similarities during the period from the fourth to third millennium B.C. which occurred on east coast of China and across the Taiwan Strait (Chang, 1969). This theory was based on the homology of pottery styles, particularly the tripod and the pedestal cup. Chang argued that it was population migration from northern China that led to this pottery assemblage change in southeast China. Later, K. C. Chang substantially modified this population migration theory. He observed that it was an increasingly intensified “interaction sphere” that brought all the changes in the late Neolithic of Southeast China (Chang, 1986, 1989). Chang maintained that this network significantly influenced the development of the Tanshishan Culture in Fujian, and he further associated the beginning of Tanshishan Culture with the replacement of the Proto-Austronesian by the Sino-Tibetan speakers (Chang, 1989).