Animal Use in a Shang Village: the Guandimiao Zooarchaeological Assemblage

Abstract

Chinese Bronze Age zooarchaeological data sets have almost exclusively been derived from large, urban centers, and often from elite contexts. The Anyang period (ca. 1250‐1050 BCE) village site of Guandimiao fills an important lacuna as a small, non‐elite, rural site. The large urban sites of the Chinese Bronze Age are thought to have been more centers of animal consumption than of stock rearing and so Guandimiao presents the first glimpse of a possible production site. In addition, the near total excavation of the original village affords a rarely fine‐grained understanding of context allowing us to distinguish broadly between domestic, ritual‐related and mortuary assemblages. These assemblages show differences in relative quantities of taxa, in body part distribution, bone modification and taphonomy, giving additional insight into animal‐related human behavior at the site. In addition, a variety of lines of evidence demonstrate a large dog‐related taphonomic bias, a subject that is generally ignored in Chinese zooarchaeology. Finally, the survivorship curves for pig and cattle generally show gradual attrition with a significant proportion of older animals, in contrast with contemporaneous Shang urban sites. This fact, plus the fact that the sex analysis performed on the pig mandibles demonstrated that they were nearly all female, supports the hypothesis that Guandimiao was a site of livestock raising and origin point for urban provisioning.

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