Shangshan Culture: Early Rice Cultivation in the Yangtze Basin

The Shangshan culture was an early Neolithic culture of the upper Qiantang River basin in Zhejiang Province, eastern China, dating to roughly 9000–6500 BC. Its villages produced some of the earliest pottery in southern China, much of it tempered with rice husks, along with grinding stones and traces of rice that may show the first steps towards domestication. Shangshan is therefore central to the long debate over when and how rice, now a staple for billions of people, became a farmed crop.

Setting: the Yangtze region after the Ice Age

At the end of the last Ice Age, around 11,700 years ago, the climate of southern China became warmer and wetter. Monsoon rains strengthened, forests of oak and other broadleaf trees spread, and wetlands formed along rivers and lakes. Wild rice, a plant of marshes and shallow water, grew in parts of the Yangtze basin, which then lay near the northern edge of its natural range.

The upper Qiantang River, which flows into Hangzhou Bay south of the Yangtze delta, offered a mix of hills, river terraces and small basins. This varied landscape provided nuts, tubers, fish and game as well as wild grasses. It was in this setting that groups of foragers began to settle down and experiment with tending rice.

Discovery and sites

The Shangshan site lies in Pujiang County in central Zhejiang, roughly 100 kilometres south of Hangzhou. It was identified in 2000 and excavated from 2001 by the Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, with the archaeologist Jiang Leping leading much of the work.

The finds were so early and distinctive that Chinese archaeologists formally named a new Shangshan culture in 2006. Since then, more than twenty related sites have been found in the Jinqu Basin and nearby valleys, including Xiaohuangshan in Shengzhou, Hehuashan in Longyou and Qiaotou in Yiwu.

At Qiaotou, a small mound surrounded by ditches yielded complete pots, some with painted decoration in red and white. These may be among the earliest painted pottery known anywhere, and the mound has been interpreted as a ritual or burial place.

Villages and daily life

The Shangshan people lived in small settlements on low terraces and hillocks. Archaeologists have found rows of post holes from wooden buildings, some apparently raised on posts, together with storage pits, ditches and hearths. This points to people living in one place for much of the year, rather than moving constantly.

Their pottery was thick, coarse and mostly red or reddish-brown. The most typical shape is a large, wide, flat-bottomed basin, along with jars and bowls. Potters often mixed plant material, especially rice husks and leaves, into the clay as temper. When the pots were fired, this material burned away, leaving impressions and microscopic remains that are now valuable evidence of rice use.

Pottery itself was not new in East Asia. Cave sites in southern China had produced pottery thousands of years earlier, and in Japan the Jōmon culture was also making early vessels. What makes Shangshan stand out is the combination of pottery, settled villages and rice.

Stone tools include grinding slabs and handstones, used to process plant foods such as acorns and grains, as well as flakes and polished stone tools. Residue studies on grinding stones show that acorns, Job’s tears and other wild plants were important foods alongside rice.

Evidence for rice

Rice remains at Shangshan come in several forms: husks and spikelets in pottery temper, charred grains, and phytoliths, tiny silica particles formed in plant cells that survive long after the plant has decayed.

Phytoliths are especially useful because some types differ between wild and domestic rice. In domestic rice, a certain type of leaf phytolith tends to have more fish-scale-like markings. In 2017 a team led by Zuo Xinxin and Lu Houyuan dated rice phytoliths from Shangshan sites directly to about 9,400 years ago and argued that some already showed domestic characteristics.

Other evidence suggests the process was slow. Domestic rice has spikelets that stay attached to the plant rather than shattering to scatter seed. Studies led by Dorian Fuller of rice spikelet bases from later sites in the lower Yangtze, such as Tianluoshan, found that non-shattering forms rose only gradually, reaching a majority by about 4000 BC.

The domestication debate

These findings have fed a long debate. Some Chinese researchers present Shangshan as the place where rice cultivation began more than 10,000 years ago. Others argue that the Shangshan people were cultivating wild or partly domesticated rice, and that full domestication took several thousand more years.

Most specialists now see rice domestication as a long, gradual process rather than a single event. People first gathered wild rice, then began planting and tending it, and over many generations their selection changed the plant. Shangshan seems to represent an early stage of this process, when rice was important but not yet the main source of food.

Part of the disagreement is about definitions. Cultivation means people deliberately planting and caring for a crop, while domestication means the plant has changed genetically as a result. People can cultivate wild plants for centuries before domestic forms dominate. The evidence from Shangshan fits cultivation well, while the extent of genetic change at this early date remains the main point of argument.

Genetic studies generally point to the Yangtze region as the area where japonica rice, the main form of rice grown in East Asia, was domesticated, though the details are still debated. Other rice varieties developed later in South Asia, probably with input from Chinese rice.

Fermented drinks and wider links

A study published in 2019 by Liu Li and colleagues analysed residues in pottery from Qiaotou and suggested that some vessels held a fermented beverage made with rice, possibly using a mould-based fermentation similar to later Chinese methods, around 9,000 years ago. If confirmed, this would place it alongside the drink found at Jiahu in Henan as one of the earliest known fermented drinks.

Shangshan was followed in the region by the Kuahuqiao culture, c. 6000–5000 BC, and later by the Hemudu culture, c. 5000–4500 BC, whose waterlogged sites preserved large amounts of rice, wooden buildings and tools. Together these cultures show the gradual growth of rice-based communities in the lower Yangtze.

Rice domestication in China ran in parallel with other centres of early farming, such as the cultivation of wheat and barley in the Near East described in Domestication of Wheat and Barley.

Timeline

• c. 9000 BC: Earliest Shangshan settlements in the Qiantang River basin.
• c. 7400 BC: Rice phytoliths from Shangshan sites show possible domestic features (dated to about 9,400 years ago).
• c. 7000 BC: Possible fermented rice drink at Qiaotou.
• c. 6500 BC: End of the Shangshan culture; later Kuahuqiao culture emerges.
• 2000: The Shangshan site is identified in Pujiang County.
• 2001: Excavations begin.
• 2006: The Shangshan culture is formally named.
• 2017: Direct dating of Shangshan rice phytoliths published.

Why it matters

Rice now feeds more people than almost any other crop. The Shangshan culture offers some of the earliest evidence for how that story began, showing communities in the Yangtze basin using and possibly cultivating rice more than 9,000 years ago. It also illustrates how farming emerged slowly, through generations of mixed foraging and cultivation, rather than in a sudden revolution.