| Abstract: |
The Xianrendong and Diaotonghuan sites are located in Dayuan basin, northeastern Jiangxi province, southern China. Xianrendong is a cave site which had been excavated in the 1960s. Diaotonghuan is a rock shelter site, only 800 m from Xianrendong. In 1993 and 1995, two seasons of excavation conducted at these sites by the joint team of the Department of Archaeology at Peking University, the Jiangxi Institute of Archaeology and the Andover Foundation for Archaeological Research yielded diagnostic artifacts that help further our understanding of early Neolithic culture in southern China. The analysis of thousands of plant phytoliths recovered from the stratigraphic zones showed an increasing proportion of domesticated rice through time, which marks the development of rice agriculture. The simultaneous rise of pottery manufacture and rice agriculture, around 16,000 - 10,000 BP, indicates the important transition from the Paleolithic into the Neolithic in Southern China.
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