Vegetation, Architecture, and Human Activities: Reconstructing Land Use History from the Late Yangshao Period in Zhengzhou Region, Central China

Xia Wang, Junjie Xu (), Duowen Mo, Hui Wang and Peng Lu
Additional contact information
Xia Wang: Institute of Geography, Henan Academy of Sciences, Zhengzhou 450052, China
Junjie Xu: School of Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou 450001, China
Duowen Mo: Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes, Ministry of Education, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
Hui Wang: Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing 100710, China
Peng Lu: Institute of Geography, Henan Academy of Sciences, Zhengzhou 450052, China

Land, 2025, vol. 14, issue 2, 1-18

Abstract: In recent decades, a large number of houses from the Late Yangshao period have been excavated in Zhengzhou. They are basically single-level buildings with wood skeletons and mud walls and use a huge amount of timber resources. Nevertheless, there are still a lot of questions about the uncertain relationship between plants, architecture, and human activities. In this study, we complete the reconstruction of a Holocene vegetation community around the Dahecun site via pollen analysis of the Z2 core. We take house F1 in Dahecun as an example to estimate the wood consumption of a single house and collect the published data of all houses from the Late Yangshao period in the study area to estimate the wood consumption of houses built in Zhengzhou during this period. Combining the above two approaches, this study explores the relationship between plants, architecture, and human activities in Zhengzhou in the Late Yangshao period, as well as the history of land use. The results are as follows: (1) After 4.9 ka BP, the number of trees and shrubs such as Pinus (falling from 58.8% to 46.9%) decreased rapidly, and the number of herbaceous plants increased. (2) Excluding the influence of the Holocene climate change, the large-scale decline in trees and shrubs in the region is likely to have been human-driven. The number of excavated houses in 11 of the 236 Late Yangshao sites in the Zhengzhou area reached 362, while the minimum wood consumption reached 1270.62 m 3 . In addition, the rapid expansion of the population size and the large-scale development of new arable land and forest clearance in the Late Yangshao period show that humans had a strong influence on the surrounding vegetation and land cover/use. The trend of regional deforestation was so obvious and irreversible that the inhabitants had to adopt techniques using less wood or no wood to build houses during the subsequent Longshan culture period.

Keywords: vegetation; architecture; human activities; Late Yangshao; Zhenghzou region (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/14/2/321/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/14/2/321/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jlands:v:14:y:2025:i:2:p:321-:d:1584039

Access Statistics for this article

Land is currently edited by Ms. Carol Ma

More articles in Land from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().