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"Chen, Xingcan"
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The archaeology of China : from the late paleolithic to the early bronze age
\"Past, present and future \"The archaeological materials recovered from the Anyang excavations ... in the period between 1928 and 1937...have laid a new foundation for the study of ancient China (Li, C. 1977: ix).\" When inscribed oracle bones and enormous material remains were found through scientific excavation in Anyang in 1928, the historicity of the Shang dynasty was confirmed beyond dispute for the first time (Li, C. 1977: ix-xi). This excavation thus marked the beginning of a modern Chinese archaeology endowed with great potential to reveal much of China's ancient history.. Half a century later, Chinese archaeology had made many unprecedented discoveries which surprised the world, leading Glyn Daniel to believe that \"a new awareness of the importance of China will be a key development in archaeology in the decades ahead (Daniel 1981: 211). This enthusiasm was soon shared by the Chinese archaeologists when Su Bingqi announced that \"the Golden Age of Chinese archaeology is arriving (Su, B. 1994: 139--140)\". In recent decades, archaeology has continuously prospered, becoming one of the most rapidly developing fields in social science in China\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Paleolithic human exploitation of plant foods during the last glacial maximum in North China
Three grinding stones from Shizitan Locality 14 (ca. 23,000-19,500 calendar years before present) in the middle Yellow River region were subjected to usewear and residue analyses to investigate human adaptation during the last glacial maximum (LGM) period, when resources were generally scarce and plant foods may have become increasingly important in the human diet. The results show that these tools were used to process various plants, including Triticeae and Paniceae grasses, Vigna beans, Dioscorea opposita yam, and Trichosanthes kirilowii snakegourd roots. Tubers were important food resources for Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, and Paniceae grasses were exploited about 12,000 y before their domestication. The long tradition of intensive exploitation of certain types of flora helped Paleolithic people understand the properties of these plants, including their medicinal uses, and eventually led to the plants' domestication. This study sheds light on the deep history of the broad spectrum subsistence strategy characteristic of late Pleistocene north China before the origins of agriculture in this region.
Journal Article
The Archaeology of China
This book explores the roles of agricultural development and advancing social complexity in the processes of state formation in China. Over a period of about 10,000 years, it follows evolutionary trajectories of society from the last Palaeolithic hunting-gathering groups, through Neolithic farming villages and on to the Bronze Age Shang dynasty in the latter half of the second millennium BC. Li Liu and Xingcan Chen demonstrate that sociopolitical evolution was multicentric and shaped by inter-polity factionalism and competition, as well as by the many material technologies introduced from other parts of the world. The book illustrates how ancient Chinese societies were transformed during this period from simple to complex, tribal to urban, and preliterate to literate.
eBook
Unveiling bast fiber production in Upper Paleolithic North China: Microfibers and usewear traces on stone tools from Shizitan
Fiber technology—including the making of cordages, mats, baskets, and textiles—holds a crucial place in human history. However, uncovering archaeological evidence of early fiber products proves challenging due to their rapid decay. To address preservation hurdles, we employ a multi-disciplinary approach to interpret microfiber remains, drawing on microfossil remains, usewear traces, ethnographic observation, and experimental archaeology, to study artifacts from two Upper Paleolithic Shizitan (SZT) site localities on the North China Loess Plateau, dating 28,000–18,000 cal BP, encompassing the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), on which we identify microremains of hemp and flax. Analyses of microfossil remains (microfibers, phytoliths, and fungi) and usewear traces on stone tools potentially reveal stages of bast fiber production, such as cutting stalks, retting, pounding fiber ribbons, and scraping to remove impurities. Such pounding and scraping are commonly associated with textile production in ethnographic accounts, and parallel evidence has also been observed on Neolithic stone tools in North China. Observations of colored fibers suggest SZT people may have extracted plant-based dyes and hematite pigment to color fibers. The cold-dry conditions of the LGM, which likely led to the depopulation of regions north of SZT, also may have driven increased fiber production, aligning with previously recognized shifts toward microblade production, broader interregional interactions, ritual activities, and broad-spectrum subsistence, including early wild millet use. This research provides new evidence for the deep history of fiber production in Upper Paleolithic China and demonstrates the value of usewear and microfossil analyses for studying ancient fiber technology.
Journal Article
Microenvironment-responsive, multimodulated herbal polysaccharide hydrogel for diabetic foot ulcer healing
Diabetic ulcers (DUs) usually suffer from severe infections, persistent inflammation, and excessive oxidative stress during the healing process, which led to the microenvironmental alternation and severely impede DU healing, resulting in a delayed wound healing. Therefore, it is particularly important to develop a medical dressing that can address these problems simultaneously. To this end, self-healing composite hydrogels were prepared in this study utilizing
Bletilla striata
polysaccharide (BSP) and Berberine (BER) with borax via borate ester bond. The chemical and mechanical properties of the BSP/BER hydrogels were characterized, and their wound healing performance was investigated in vivo and in vitro. The results showed that the BSP/BER hydrogel significantly accelerated wound healing in DU mice with the healing rate of 94.90 ± 1.81% on the 14th day by using BSP/BER5, and this outstanding performance was achieved by the multi-targeted biological functions of antibacterial, anti-inflammatory and antioxidant, which provided favorable microenvironment for orderly recovery of the wound. Aside from exhibiting the antibacterial rate of over 90% against both
Escherichia coli
and
Staphylococcus aureu
s, the BSP/BER5 hydrogel could significantly reduce NO levels 4.544 ± 0.32 µmol/L to exert its anti-inflammatory effects. Additionally, it demonstrated a hemolysis rate and promotes cell migration capabilities at (34.92 ± 1.66%). With the above features, the developed BSP/BER hydrogel in this study could be the potential dressing for clinical treatment of DU wound.
Journal Article
The quest for red rice beer: transregional interactions and development of competitive feasting in Neolithic China
The Neolithic cultures in China during the fourth millennium BC experienced increased transregional interactions, characterized by artifacts with striking similarities being distributed over an unprecedentedly large area, including certain forms of ceramic vessels. This phenomenon has been described as the interaction sphere, which formed the foundations of Chinese civilization. However, the exact function of those vessels has remained largely unclear. In this study, we focus on one type of such vessels,
dakougang
(wide orifice vats; DKG), which have often been found in elite burials and distributed from the Yangzi River environs to the Yellow River valley. By analyzing microfossil remains (starch, phytoliths, and fungi) in the residues on DKG and hypothetical drinking vessels (jars and cups) unearthed from a late Dawenkou culture site at Yuchisi in Anhui province, we conclude that these vessels were used for production and consumption of fermented beverages. The ingredients include rice, millet, Job’s tears, Triticeae, and snake gourd root; the fermentation method was to prepare a
qu
starter predominantly containing
Monascus
mold for producing red colored beer. The red beer made with DKG probably functioned as sacred drinks that conferred prestige on the host, served in competitive feasts, and associated with the emergence of elite social groups. The revelation of red rice beer produced and consumed with DKG, therefore, sheds new light on the intensified transregional interactions which contributed to the growth of social stratification at the dawn of Chinese civilization.
Journal Article
Plants and people from the Early Neolithic to Shang periods in North China
An assemblage of charred plant remains collected from 26 sites in the Yiluo valley of North China as part of an archaeological survey spans the period from the sixth millennium to 1300 calibrated calendrical years (cal) B.C. The plant remains document a long sequence of crops, weeds, and other plants in the country. The results also demonstrate the effectiveness of sediment sampling as part of an archaeological survey. Ten accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) radiocarbon dates on crop remains inform an assessment of the sequence of agricultural development in the region. Foxtail millet (Setaria italica subsp. italica) was grown during the Early Neolithic period and was the principal crop for at least four millennia. Broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum) was significantly less important throughout the sequence. Rice (Oryza sativa) was introduced by 3000 cal B.C. but apparently was not an important local crop. Wheat became a significant crop between 1600 and 1300 cal B.C. The weed flora diversified through time and were dominated by annual grasses, some of which were probably fodder for domesticated animals. The North China farming tradition that emphasized dry crops (millets, wheat, and legumes) with some rice appears to have been established at the latest by the Early Shang (Erligang; 1600-1300 B.C.) period.
Journal Article
Online Learning-Based Adaptive Device-Free Localization in Time-Varying Indoor Environment
With the widespread use of WiFi devices and the availability of channel state information (CSI), CSI-based device-free localization (DFL) has attracted lots of attention. Fingerprint-based localization methods are the primary solutions for DFL, but they are faced with the fingerprint similarity problem due to the complex environment and low bandwidth of the commercial WiFi. Meanwhile, fingerprints may change unpredictably due to multipath WiFi signal propagation in time-varying environments. To tackle these problems, this paper proposes an adaptive online learning DFL method, which adaptively updates the localization model to ensure long-term accuracy and adaptability. Specifically, the CSI signals of the target located at different reference points are first collected and transformed to discriminable fingerprints using the weights of Multilayer Online Sequence Extreme Learning Machine (ML-OSELM). After that, an online learning DFL model is built to adapt to the changes of the environment. Experimental results in a time-varying indoor environment validate the adaptability of the proposed method against environmental changes and show that our method can achieve 10% improvement over other methods.
Journal Article
Plant domestication, cultivation, and foraging by the first farmers in early Neolithic Northeast China: Evidence from microbotanical remains
North China is regarded as a center of domestication for broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum) and foxtail millet (Setaria italica ssp. italica). The Neolithic Xinglonggou site (ca. 8000–7500 cal. BP) in the Liao River region has revealed the earliest macrobotanical evidence of domesticated millets in Northeast China, but controversy remains as to the importance of the millets in human diet. We employed an interdisciplinary approach involving analyses of starch grains, phytoliths, and usewear patterns to study a range of materials from Xinglonggou, including grinding stones, human dental calculus, and vegetative charcoal. The results demonstrate a broad spectrum of plant exploitation by the first farmers in Northeast China rather than dependence upon singular crops. Furthermore, three types of underground storage organs appear to be major staples, while millets were secondary to another early and important cultivated cereal, Job’s tears (Coix lacryma-jobi L.). Wild grasses and acorns also account for small portions of plants used. This study documents the northernmost and earliest occurrence of Job’s tears in temperate Northeast China, a species which may have originated in the subtropical regions. We argue that Job’s tears may have been one of the earliest domesticates in China along with millets.
Journal Article
A Quantitative Assessment of the Impacts of Land Use and Natural Factors on Water Quality in the Red River Basin, China
The quality of water in the Red River is a complex interplay between human-induced changes and inherent natural variables. This research utilized the snapshot sampling approach, garnering water quality data from 45 sampling sites in the Red River and crafting 24 environmental indicators related to land use and inherent natural determinants at the catchment scale. Through Spearman rank correlation and redundancy analyses, relationships among land use, natural variables, and water quality were elucidated. Our variance partitioning revealed differentiated impacts of land use and natural factors on water quality. Pivotal findings indicated superior water quality in the Red River, driven mainly by land use dynamics, which showed a distinct geomorphic gradient. Specific land use attributes, like cropland patch density, grassland’s largest patch index, and urban metrics, were pivotal in explaining variations in parameters such as total nitrogen, ammonia, and temperature. Notably, the configuration of land use had a more profound influence on water quality than merely its components. In terms of natural influences, while topography played a dominant role in shaping water quality, other factors like soil and weather had marginal impacts. Elevation was notably linked with metrics like total phosphorus and suspended solids, whereas precipitation and slope significantly determined electrical conductivity and chlorophyll-a models. In sum, incorporating both land use configurations and natural determinants offers a more comprehensive understanding of water quality disparities in the Red River’s ecosystem. For holistic water quality management, the focus should not only be on the major contributors like croplands and urban areas but also on underemphasized areas like grasslands. Tweaking cropland distribution, recognizing the intertwined nature of land use and natural elements, and tailoring land management based on topographical variations are essential strategies moving forward.
Journal Article