Hemudu Culture: Rice Farmers of the Neolithic Yangtze Delta

The Hemudu culture was a Neolithic culture of the lower Yangtze region of eastern China, flourishing from about 5000 to 3300 BC on the coastal plains of Zhejiang province. Its waterlogged sites preserved huge quantities of rice, the timbers of houses raised on stilts, wooden and bone tools, lacquer and carved ivory. Discovered in 1973, it transformed knowledge of early rice farming and showed that southern China had developed sophisticated villages as early as the north.

Discovery

The Hemudu site lies near the village of Hemudu in Yuyao county, roughly 20 to 25 kilometres west of the port city of Ningbo. It was found in 1973 when local people were digging for a drainage and irrigation project. Archaeologists from Zhejiang province carried out excavations in 1973–1974 and again in 1977–1978.

The site is waterlogged, which means that wood, plant remains and other organic materials survived in remarkable condition. Four main cultural layers were identified, the lowest and richest dating to around 5000 BC. In 1993 the Hemudu Site Museum opened beside the excavations.

Since 2004, excavations at Tianluoshan, about 7 kilometres away, have added detailed new evidence. It is one of several further sites that show the Hemudu culture was spread across the Ningshao Plain and nearby islands.

Rice and the landscape

The most famous finds are rice remains. In some areas of the Hemudu site, layers of rice husks, grains, straw and leaves were tens of centimetres thick. When first reported in the 1970s, this was the oldest and largest find of rice in the world, and it suggested that the lower Yangtze was a key centre of rice domestication.

Later research refined this picture. Studies of rice spikelet bases from Tianluoshan, published in 2009 by Dorian Fuller and colleagues, showed that many grains still had features of wild rice, which naturally sheds its grains. Rice was being cultivated, but domestication was still under way between about 4900 and 4600 BC. Earlier evidence from the Shangshan culture shows that rice use in the region began thousands of years before Hemudu.

Rice was not the only food. People gathered acorns, water chestnuts and fox nuts from the surrounding marshes, fished, and hunted deer and other animals. They kept pigs and dogs. Water buffalo bones are common, but recent studies suggest these were wild animals that were hunted rather than domestic herds.

Stilt houses and wooden joinery

Hemudu people built long houses raised on wooden piles above the damp ground, a style known in Chinese as ganlan. Hundreds of timber piles, beams and planks survived. Some show carefully cut mortise and tenon joints, in which a projecting tongue of wood fits into a socket, and others have tongue-and-groove edges.

These are among the earliest examples of such joinery in East Asia. They show that Hemudu carpenters had mastered techniques that would remain central to Chinese timber architecture for thousands of years. A wooden structure at the site has also been interpreted as one of the earliest known wells.

Tools, crafts and art

Hemudu farmers used spades made from the shoulder blades of large mammals, lashed to wooden handles. Over a hundred were found. Wooden paddles suggest the use of boats on the waterways and coast. Spindle whorls and wooden parts of looms point to weaving.

Pottery was mostly black, tempered with plant material and charcoal, and sometimes incised with designs of plants, birds and pigs. A small wooden bowl coated with red lacquer, made from the sap of the lacquer tree, is often cited as one of the earliest lacquered objects in the world.

The culture’s most celebrated artworks are carved in ivory and bone. One ivory plaque shows two birds facing a central circle that is often interpreted as the sun. Bird imagery of this kind recurs in later art of the region, including that of the Liangzhu culture.

Music and play may also be reflected in the finds. Archaeologists recovered whistles made from hollow bird bones, as well as a pottery figure of a pig. Small carved objects of bone and ivory, some showing birds, were probably ornaments or ritual items.

Most of these finds came from the lowest layers, which were the best preserved because they lay below the water table. Upper layers, closer to the surface, contained fewer organic remains, but their pottery shows gradual change towards the styles of neighbouring cultures to the north.

Tianluoshan and later research

The site of Tianluoshan, discovered in 2001, has become the most important source of new information about the Hemudu culture. Excavations led by the Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology have uncovered wooden house posts still standing in the ground, pits filled with stored acorns, and areas next to the village that have been interpreted as early rice fields.

International teams have studied seeds, animal bones and residues from the site in great detail. Their work shows a mixed economy in which rice farming grew steadily more important but did not replace foraging. Acorns and other nuts were a major food, and wild plants and animals from the wetlands remained essential.

Other related sites on the nearby coast and offshore islands show that Hemudu people also travelled by water and exploited marine resources.

Living with the sea

The Ningshao Plain is a low coastal plain, and during the middle Holocene it was repeatedly affected by changes in sea level. At the earlier Kuahuqiao site nearby, dated to about 6000–5000 BC, a dugout canoe was found, and the settlement appears to have been abandoned when sea water flooded the area.

Hemudu people chose slightly higher ground at the foot of hills, close to freshwater marshes. Their stilt houses kept floors dry in a wet landscape. Layers of flood deposits between occupation levels at some sites show that they lived with recurring floods and returned after them.

Place in Chinese prehistory

Before Hemudu, many scholars believed that Chinese civilisation spread outwards from the Yellow River valley, home of the Yangshao culture. Hemudu showed that the Yangtze region had its own advanced Neolithic tradition, based on rice rather than millet, at the same time.

Today archaeologists see early China as a set of interacting regional cultures. The lower Yangtze developed from Shangshan and Kuahuqiao to Hemudu, then to Majiabang, Songze and Liangzhu. Around 3300 BC Hemudu sites decline, possibly linked to changing sea levels and flooding on the coastal plain, although the reasons are still debated.

Hemudu also matters for public understanding. The site museum, with reconstructed stilt houses beside the excavated area, has made the culture one of the best-known Neolithic cultures in China.

Timeline

• c. 5500 BC: Earliest Hemudu-related settlements on the Ningshao Plain.
• c. 5000 BC: Lowest and richest layer at the Hemudu site, with rice and stilt houses.
• c. 4900–4600 BC: Rice at Tianluoshan still undergoing domestication.
• c. 4000 BC: Hemudu culture interacts with Majiabang culture to the north.
• c. 3300 BC: Hemudu culture declines; Liangzhu culture rises in the region.
• 1973: Hemudu site discovered during water-management works.
• 1977–1978: Second major excavation season.
• 2004: Excavations begin at Tianluoshan.

Why it matters

Hemudu offered the first rich picture of Neolithic life in southern China: rice farming, wetland foraging, skilled woodworking and art. It helped establish the Yangtze as one of the cradles of Chinese civilisation and of rice agriculture, a crop that now feeds more than half the world.