The 4,000-year-old network of ceramic water pipes unearthed at the archaeological site of Pingliangtai on the Central Plains of China represents an unprecedented social and environmental manipulation as Neolithic societies faced surging environmental crises in the East Asian Monsoon region.
Water situates at the crucial interface between the environment and society. It is not purely natural or cultural. In monsoonal environments, in particular, water profoundly defines the ways people respond to and modify their environment for basic survival and successive developments.
Technologies and social organizations of water management are long considered closely intertwined with the seasonality of monsoonal rainfall and cycles of social and economic production and reproduction.
In China, the tale of the legendary Great Yu’s heroic taming of floods and the subsequent founding of the Xia Dynasty continues to dominate mainstream scholarly narrative on the formation of China’s first state.
The importance of state-organized hydraulic projects and elites’ control of water to the evolution of Bronze Age and early imperial societies is also emphasized in recent archaeological studies.
The Late Neolithic Pingliangtai walled site demonstrates how environmental vagaries, technological innovations and social institutions converged to form a ‘cooperative social governance’ on water management, which provides a different model for the origins of hydro-sociality in ancient East Asia.
The site is located in what is now the Huaiyang District of Zhoukou City in central China.
During the Neolithic times, the town was home to about 500 people with protective earthen walls and a surrounding moat.
Situated on the Upper Huai River Plain on the vast Huanghuaihai Plain, the area’s climate 4,000 years ago was marked by big seasonal climate shifts, where summer monsoons would commonly dump half a meter of rain on the region monthly.
“The discovery of this ceramic water pipe…
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