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All agree that the antiquity of Chinese civilization indicated that it emerged from farming societies. The domestication of plants such as millet in northern China and the rice in the south facilitated, with other plant food and a few domesticated animals, the increasing number of people overall East Asia. Not less intriguing, as in other parts of the world, are the issues of expansion of humans with the “agricultural package” from the centers, and how this process is expressed in the emergence and dispersals of languages.
It is in this domain of research that the book in front of us is a major contribution to recognizing and understanding cultural changes in southeast China that took place during the local Neolithic period known to span about 3000 years, from about 6500 B.P. until around 3500 years ago. The prehistory of the coastal mainland of this region, and in particular of the Fujian Province, is closely tied with the archaeology of Taiwan, and Southeast Asia as a whole. Seafaring along the coasts of the western Pacific ocean, locally known as China Sea facilitated long range human connects, movements, exchange, and dispersals. The knowledge of employing the sea as a faster way accumulated in this part of the world since the colonization of Australia some 40,000 years ago. Even without the concrete evidence of the types of sea-crafts used by the prehistoric navigators, the maritime routes contributed to the acceleration of social processes in this region.
The development of the Neolithic communities in southeast China testify the process of adoption of agriculture either by local foragers or by the colonization of farmers who moved into these territories from the southern basin of the Yangtze River. The mosaic of maritime and agriculture subsistence is neatly represented by the sites reported and discussed in this volume. Similarities with pottery types from the inland reflect the impact of exchange, population expansion or both. One should keep in mind that hunter-gatherers in East Asia made pottery since some 16,000 years ago. Thus, unlike Western Asia, pottery was not a marker of agricultural economy.
The main thrust of this volume is the reports from two major sites re-excavated by the author in cooperation with Fujian local archaeologists. Their analysis is joined by the information retrieved from other sites in the same area.