Changes in regional settlement patterns and the development of complex societies in southeastern Shandong, China

Around the globe, archaeological settlement pattern survey has brought a new spatial, diachronic, and theoretical vantage to the study of early civilizations. This paper provides a new perspective on the rise and reorganization of complex societies in northern China through the synthesis of 11 years of systematic regional survey in southeastern Shandong Province. Based on our surface findings, we suspect that the agricultural colonization of this coastal region occurred primarily during the later half of the Neolithic and was rapidly followed by the development of a four-tiered settlement hierarchy with two primary centers during the Early Longshan period. We also document the reorganization of this regional system during the Bronze Age, and the eventual political integration of this study area under polities centered to the west (and outside the region surveyed). We argue that southeastern Shandong was not merely a backwater or periphery throughout its history, particularly in regard to the Early–Middle Longshan periods when there were centers of great size. Through our long-term and broad-scale perspective, we provide new evidence of how complex societies arose and changed over millennia in northern China.