Food between the country and the city: The politics of food production at Shimao and Zhaimaoliang in the Ordos Region, northern China

The archaeology of early China has commonly been critically explored through the study of specialization, particularly in regards to craft production and secondary product exploitation in the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age periods. It is argued that if we are to gain a clearer understanding of the important changes which characterize the development of urbanization in early China, we must also study and compare food remains in order to understand early food production systems. Here, we use faunal remains to compare food production and animal exploitation strategies between the late Neolithic to early Bronze Age urban site of Shimao, and a contemporaneous small rural village, Zhaimaoliang. A detailed quantitative analysis of taxonomic compositions, mortality profiles, and body part distributions are used to suggest that residents at both sites equally produced animals at the household level. Results demonstrate that residents at both sites exploited a limited range of domestic species. Furthermore, survivorship data indicate that at both sites the main domestic animals (pigs, caprine, and cattle) were primarily exploited for primary products such as meat, and a wide diversity of age groups were represented including juvenile and animals that survived into full adulthood.