A GIS-Based spatial assessment of settlement change in Holocene Northern China

Abstract

With modem society paying increasing attention to environmental issues to address sustainability, archaeological data offer a promising source to support the study of ancient culture-landscape relationships from a comparative perspective. China, as a country with an extensive cultural tradition and diverse topographic environment, provides an ideal case to study cultural responses to climate change. Based on extensive published archaeological survey data for northern China, this thesis describes a GIS based spatial analysis aimed at understanding cultural responses to Holocene climate changes. These responses are studied from the joint perspectives of changes through time in archaeological site distributions and their interactions with the local topographic conditions.

Ancient occupational densities through time are first examined at a broad spatial scale to reveal broad evolutionary patterns in cultural prosperity and social hierarchy. A possible pattern of cultural response to the periodic Holocene retreat of the northern limit of the East Asian Monsoon is proposed. Following the broad scale study, which mainly examines archaeological distributions in a two dimensional manner, a middle scale study investigates changes in site distributions in relation to patterns of variation in topographic features. The majority of the analysis of the thesis is conducted at this middle scale. By reconstructing ancient riverine site clusters, distances from sites to water resources are analysed to indicate the degree of reliance on water supplies, and thereby reflect possible spatial responses to changes in precipitation. By also presenting a topographic classification and then comparing ancient occupational densities with different landscapes, it is found that changing land-use patterns can reflect transitions in subsistence strategy. These analyses are conducted in three separate geographical units across cultural zones from the Early Neolithic to the Bronze Age to demonstrate different responses in the different areas over time. This facilitates an understanding of the evolution of cultural diversity in response to climatic variability.

The spatial analysis module of ArcGIS is applied in this thesis to the spatial distribution of archaeological survey data acquired from the published Atlas of Chinese Relics. These data have limited temporal definition and site size identification. Nevertheless, the overall response patterns to well-known climatic events such as the Holocene Thermal Maximum, the Western Zhou cold period and the retreat of the Eastern Asian Monsoon are clearly revealed, with transitions in subsistence strategies occurring especially in the peripheral regions.

Despite remaining technical problems and deficiencies in data quality, spatial analysis based on extensive archaeological survey data is shown in this thesis to provide a sound basis to support the study of ancient culture-landscape relationships. Further advances in this area are anticipated as more comprehensive archaeological data at finer scales become available. Show more