Archaeology Magazine — March-April 2018

N

atural disasters were a constant threat for people liv-

ing in the ancient city of Liangzhu in China’s Yangtze

Delta. The annual monsoons posed a severe risk of

flooding, so the city’s residents constructed an extensive net-

work of dams and reservoirs along with an enormous levee in

and around the 740 -acre settlement. “The sheer scale is really

phenomenal—the scale of landscape

transformation, the scale of labor

mobilization, and the scale of rice

farming as well,” says Yijie Zhuang,

one of the project’s archaeologists,

based at University College London.

He believes that these constructions

were used to irrigate rice paddies and

transport stone and timber from the

nearby mountains. The hydraulic

complex consists of 51 canals in and

around the city and 11 dams forming

two reservoirs. All of this was accomplished between 5 , 000 and

4 , 800 years ago, during the Neolithic period, about 1 , 000 years

before state-level societies capable of these kinds of massive

public works were thought to have developed.

Liangzhu had an estimated 22 , 900 to 34 , 000 residents.

Excavations there have been ongoing for the past few decades.

Previous excavations have uncovered

burials containing luxury items such as

exquisitely carved jade artifacts, which

indicate that the city was socially

stratified. Liangzhu is not the only

ancient site that suggests that complex

societies were developing earlier than

thought. Upstream on the Yangtze

River, another ancient city, Shimao,

may also have had large-scale construc-

tion projects around the same time.

—Zach Zorich

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Palace complex, Liangzhu, China