Coastal Shandong, China: The longue duree

Our regional study documents demographic and political shifts in coastal Shandong, China, over 3000 years. Drawing on systematic archaeological settlement pattern findings from a more than 3100 km(2) area, we present evidence for occupational shifts from the initial habitation of this long coastal basin by peoples with an extant agricultural village economy to the rise of a linear string of important and seemingly autonomous coastal centers to the breakdown of this network and the region's eventual incorporation as an ultimate provincial piece into the Qin Empire. These findings illustrate the transition of this coastal zone from emergent polities that were mostly tied into a north-south coastal network during the Neolithic to a seaside province of later empires whose polity capitals were well to the west.