From Wild Rice to Village Life: An Archaeologist's Notebook from China

Field Notebook of Dr. Ruth Adeyemi, Southern China

1October 3. Xianrendong Cave, in the hills of Jiangxi province. Foragers sheltered in this cave off and on for thousands of years. Broken pieces of pottery found here are about 20,000 years old, among the oldest pots known anywhere in the world. The bones of deer and other wild animals, along with shells, show what the cave's people hunted and gathered. In the later layers, scientists found tiny traces of rice plants. Most experts think these came from wild rice that people gathered from marshes nearby.

2October 9. Hemudu, near the coast south of Hangzhou Bay. People lived in this village about 7,000 years ago, around 5000 BCE. The land around it was low, wet and marshy, and the village sat beside a lake. Its long wooden houses stood on rows of posts, with the floors raised above the ground. The builders cut the beams so that one piece fitted tightly into a slot in the next. Thick layers of rice husks, straw and grains lay buried here. Many of the grains look like farmed rice, though some may come from wild plants. Villagers dug with spades made from the shoulder blades of large animals tied to wooden handles. They kept pigs and dogs. Diggers also found acorns, water chestnuts and the bones of deer, fish and turtles.

3October 15. Our own trench, in a river valley farther inland. We dug through three layers of soil. The bottom layer is the oldest. I counted what we found in one bucket of soil from each layer (see the table). The top layer surprised me most.

4October 20. Back at the dig house, I keep thinking about rice. Acorns drop from oak trees and wait on the ground to be picked up. A rice field is different. It must be planted, kept wet, weeded and guarded from birds and wild pigs for months before the harvest. Dried rice, though, can be stored for many months after it is cut.