Duo Tian

The spatial organization within ancient settlements offers valuable insights into the evolution of social complexity. This paper examines spatially and chronologically contextualized architectural structures and artifacts uncovered at the Late Bronze Age Shirenzigou site to explore the relationship between the use of space and underlying social dynamics in the Eastern Tianshan Mountains of Xinjiang (China). Central to our findings is a distinctive centripetal compound structure, consisting of a larger non-domestic building surrounded by smaller dwellings. This arrangement, along with the variety and distribution of the artifacts, reveals a complex interplay between private and communal spaces at the site, reflecting a growing complexity within the social fabric of the community. The formation of conglomerates of houses around a central communal structure which occurs across the Tianshan Mountains appears to be a strategic adaptation in response to environmental challenges and socio-political transformations across this region at the end of the second millennium BCE.

Xinjiang, in Northwestern China, was a key point in the prehistoric trans-Eurasian network of exchange and played an important role in facilitating the dispersal of crops across Eurasia. Millet crops were first cultivated and used ca. 10,000 years ago in Northern China, from where they spread via different routes, leaving intriguing traces in various sites across Xinjiang. This paper presents the latest data on millet in Xinjiang. By employing a multidisciplinary approach, including radiocarbon dating, archaeobotanical evidence, and carbon isotope datasets, this study explores potential routes by which millet entered Xinjiang and traces its expansion from the third millennium BC to the 10th century AD. The research highlights the significant role of millet in shaping the ancient economies and cultures of Xinjiang and Central Asia, while also underscoring the importance of further investigation to uncover the complex pathways of its dispersal across Eurasia.

Archaeological fieldwork at the fortified site of Kuiyukexiehai'er (Koyuk Shahri) in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of north-western China yields the earliest known evidence for urban occupation in the Tarim Basin, providing new insights into early urbanism and agro-pastoral subsistence practices in the region during the first millennium BC.

The nature of economies and the movement of agricultural crops across Eurasia in the Bronze Age have been the subject of significant research interest in recent years. This study presents and discusses new results of flotation, radiocarbon and carbon stable isotope analyses from the seed assemblage at the Adunqiaolu site (northwestern Xinjiang), in combination with archaeological evidence. Archaeobotanical evidence, including carbonized foxtail millet, broomcorn millet, and naked barley, documents the diversity of local cereal consumption during the mid-second millennium BC. Our results suggest that crops were not grown locally, however, but in the lower Boertala Valley, supporting the argument that Adunqiaolu was a winter camp. These new sets of data constitute an important contribution to the discussion on cereal dispersal across the Tianshan Mountains in the Bronze Age.

We report an archaeobotanical analysis of flotation samples taken from Shirenzigou, an Early Iron Age agro-pastoralist site dated between the fourth and first century BC, located on the northern slope of the Tianshan Mountains in Xinjiang, China. The charred macro-botanical assemblage is dominated by naked barley grains with a few broomcorn and foxtail millet grains. In the context of Trans-Eurasian exchange of cereal crops, southwest Asian crops (wheat and barley) and two Asian millets (broomcorn and foxtail) were introduced to Xinjiang a few centuries to a millennium before Shirenzigou was occupied. The choice of barley cultivation in preference to wheat and millet may have been possibly driven by the relatively extreme local environment and the scheduling requirements of mobile pastoralism. Barley is well suited to this environment, and the choice of naked barley in preference to hulled barley may have been driven by the whole grain tradition prevailing in East Asia.