Millet production inside and outside the settlement
How people managed the resources available to them is one of the fundamental issues that every study of an early sedentary community must address. In the following sections we discuss food production and consumption in the context of the social spaces of Xinglonggou i, ii, and ιιι, in order to address how staple crops were produced, processed, and distributed among members of the community, and consumed or manipulated to acquire status or wealth.
Although the focus of the flotation programme directed by Zhijun Zhao at Xinglonggou was the early Neolithic occupation of the site, samples were also taken from Xinglonggou ii and ιιι, representing the first systematic flotation programme in China. The flotation at Xinglonggou i yielded more than 1,500 charred grains of broomcorn millet (see Figure 12.3), together with about 20 of foxtail millet. The broomcorn millet was directly radiocarbon dated to c. 7,700 cal bp. Both broomcorn and foxtail millet were recovered from Xinglonggou ii and ιιι.
As the progenitor of broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum) is unknown, our knowledge about how the domesticated form of broomcorn was selected from its wild ancestor is relatively limited. It has been noticed, however, that millet grains from three localities of Xinglonggou show a gradual increase in size and change in shape over time. Zhao has observed that the broomcorn millet from Xinglonggou i is intermediate in caryopsis size and shape between modern domesticated and wild forms, and therefore represents an early stage of domestication.[728] [729] On a broader geographic scale, broomcorn millet grains recovered from various sites across northern China also show a gradual increase in size over time.41 This process of morphological change had been associated with the relative increase of foxtail millet and decrease of broomcorn millet in assemblages.
Turning from the remains of the crops themselves to the accompanying plant taxa, millet grains from Xinglonggou i account for only 15 per cent of all grains recovered by flotation.
A great quantity of Cerastium glomeratum (Caryophyllaceae) and Astragalus sp. (Leguminosae) was identified from Xinglonggou ι. More than 50 per cent of seeds identified from Xinglonggou i belong to these two species. Cerastium glomeratum is an annual herb widely distributed in China, often appearing on foothill landscapes in northern China. Amaranthus spp. (Amaranthaceae) and Chenopodium spp. (Chenopodiaceae) were also common within Xinglonggou i assemblages. All four genera occur as weed infestations of crops today.[730] Some nine species of Amaranthus and eight species of Chenopodium are reported as common weeds. Chenopodium album is reported as one of the major weeds infesting the fields of crops in northern China.[731] All these species produce edible grains maturing roughly at the same time as millet, suggesting that the field system at Xinglonggou i was quite different from our notion of an agricultural or horticultural field today. In Xinglonggou ii, millet accounts for an even lower proportion of all identifiable plant remains. A great number of fruits and nuts were recovered by the flotation, including Pyrus betulaefolia, Prunus armeniaca, Quercus sp., Corylus heterophylla, and Juglans mandshurica. Contrastingwith the patterns of Xinglonggou i and ii, in Xinglonggou iii crops predominate in flotation samples. Apart from broomcorn and foxtail millet, charred soybean was recovered.The majority of the carbonized evidence from Xinglonggou i was recovered from houses. An interesting feature of these assemblages and the site in general was the absence of chaff - either free chaff or chaff attached to grains. The grains were all recovered as clean caryopses. This reverses the pattern from later sites in this region, such as Sanzuodian, a large lower Xiajiadian period site contemporaneous with Xinglonggou iii. In Sanzuodian, more than 5,500 charred grains of broomcorn millet and about 5,000 foxtail millet grains were identified from 102 samples.44 Millet remains were recovered from almost every house, from floor areas and the space between the two concentric walls of the house.
Moreover, there was plentiful evidence for millet chaff, and millet grains were found in association with fragments of lemma and palea of broomcorn millet as well as with fragments of broken millet embryos. Both constitute evidence of the de-husking stage of millet processing.Xinglonggou, China
These differences may reflect changes in the social organization of crop processing. In the Bronze Age lower Xiajiadian period, the routine processing activities took place inside ‘households', where de-husking was probably carried out in a piecemeal manner. As suggested by ethnographic observations, in such a scenario, both the products and the by-products of those activities have a higher probability of reaching household fires and therefore entering archaeological contexts as charred botanical material. The house structure of this period, consisting of a ‘dwelling' and ‘granary' enclosed by narrow stone walls, formed an enclosure within which food was shared between members, with the substantial stone boundaries separating the sharing of food from other ‘households'. In short, there was a boundedness of production and consumption at the family level. By contrast, the crop evidence from Xinglonggou i implies a rather different organization of settlement life, involving the participation and co-operation of a larger community: the grains had been fully threshed beyond these core units, indicating that the processing activities had happened somewhere else beyond the settlement core.