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In the Chinese context, pottery that predates ca. 9000 14 C BP is referred to as “early pottery”. Research on the early pottery of China had been conducted mostly in central and southern China; in contrast, research in northern China has been restricted, and only 5 sites had been discovered to date. Therefore, additional data is needed to foster the progress of research on early pottery in northern China. Given this situation, there is great value in the investigation of the many potsherds associated with microblade industry that have been found in secondary sediments of Layer 5 of the Lingjing site in Henan Province, on the Huang-Huai Plain at the southern end of the North China Plain. Based on AMS 14 C dates (ca. 9.8 cal ka), typological features of the pottery, and features of the other artifacts found at Lingjing, these potsherds are argued by this paper to be examples of early pottery, meaning that Lingjing constitutes a new site yielding early pottery in northern China. Other than these archaeological results, our research on Lingjing pottery has also yielded primary data on stable carbon/nitrogen isotope analysis and starch residue analysis. On the basis of archaeological research on early pottery, including examples from Lingjing, it appears that pottery in northern China generally emerged at the beginning of the Holocene (11.7 cal ka). Therefore, this emergence of pottery was likely related to the rapid warming just after the end of the last glacial period, after the Younger Dryas. The archaeological evidence also indicates increasing utilization of plant resources and diversification of food resources beginning prior to that time, suggesting that early pottery may have played a major role in this change in subsistence strategy in northern China. Archaeological comparisons between the early pottery of northern and central/southern China show substantial differences. Based on its association with microblade technology and on characteristic features such as vessels with a flat base, this early pottery from northern China may be related to that from regions further north, such as the Russian Far East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The source to sink process of terrigenous sediment from East Asia continent to the marginal seas is crucial for the understanding of land–ocean interaction and marine sedimentary process in the West Pacific continental margin. This paper presents element geochemical and Sr–Nd isotopic records of core CM97 in the Changjiang (Yangtze River) Estuary and core MD06–3040 on the inner shelf of East China Sea, aiming to reconstruct the Changjiang sediment source–to–sink transport process and its major controlling mechanism during the Holocene. Driven by the asynchronous evolution of the Indian and East Asian summer monsoon, the provenance of sediments accumulated in the Changjiang Estuary gradually changed from the upper catchment during the late glacial period to the mid–lower valley in the early–mid Holocene. With the intensive agricultural cultivation and urbanization development in the catchment during the late Holocene, the major source of Changjiang sediment into the sea shifted back to the upper catchment, again. The high–frequency ENSO activity may superimpose the effect of human disturbances on sediment source–to–sink process in the late Holocene. Therefore, the Holocene provenance evolution of Changjiang sediments in the East China Sea witnessed the changes of governing sediment erosion process within a large catchment from monsoon climate–dominated to anthropogenic driving. Our study also suggests the strong effect of hydrodynamics in coastal and shelf environments on sedimentary geochemical compositions, which deserves more attention in further sediment provenance study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a part of the INQUA project “A Global Digital Database and Atlas of Quaternary Dune Field and Sand Seas”, 337 age records from the desert dunes of China and 20 from Mongolian dune fields have been compiled in the database. This has opened the possibility of exploring and synthesizing the Quaternary environmental changes in the Asian mid-latitudes dune fields directly from the on-site aeolian sand archives. This paper assessed the sand dune chronologies in terms of geographical distribution, data quality and their implications for late Quaternary palaeoenvironmental reconstructions. The available ages are concentrated mainly in the last 20 ka and many are from the fields of stabilized dunes in the eastern portion of the desert belt in northern China. The number of records and the ratio between the records of stable state and the total records could act as a proxy for the palaeoenvironmental interpretation. The aeolian sand activities deciphered from the chronological data in the eastern portion of the desert belt in northern China show a reasonable correlation with the general global climatic curves at the glacial–interglacial timescales. The limited aeolian sand records from the glacial period, however, hamper the understanding of the detailed features (e.g., forms and processes) of the dune fields during glacial times. In the last two millennia, however, there has not been any meaningful correlation between aeolian dune activity and climatic variation at the centennial time scales, probably due to the complexity of the aeolian sand systems and human interventions. Extending the coverage of dune chronology both temporally and spatially is urgently needed for a full understanding of the environmental changes in the dune fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]