Yunnan Archaeology

The concept of “workshop” is widely used in studies of ancient craft production, yet it often relies on rigid, culturally specific criteria that are ill-suited to mobile pastoral contexts, where conventional traces of organized manufacturing activity are seldom preserved. In Northern China, interpretations have been further shaped by a perceived divide between pastoralist and agricultural communities—the former assumed to rely on domestic production and the latter linked to more complex workshop-based systems. Functional, zooarchaeological, and workflow analyses of temporally and spatially contextualized worked bones from Building IIIF1 at the Iron Age pastoral campsite of Shirenzigou, in the Eastern Tianshan, provide compelling evidence for a specialized production space associated with pastoral strategies. Beyond evidence of bone working, the combination of diverse production-related items and deposits, the structure’s unusually large size, and the absence of domestic features together suggest that IIIF1 functioned as a collective multi-craft facility, likely emerging in response to increasing regional socio-political complexity during the first millennium BCE. These findings prompt a reconsideration of the concept and defining attributes of workshops and highlight the need for more flexible models that can account for the variability of pastoralist societies.

BackgroundThe formation of the Han Chinese is deeply rooted in the Neolithic cultures of the Yellow River basin, particularly the pivotal Longshan cultural sphere which bridged prehistoric societies and early dynastic civilization. However, the genetic impact of Longshan-era populations on subsequent historical groups remains largely unexplored due to a critical lack of ancient genomic data from this key transitional period. This gap hinders a clear understanding of how early cultural integration in the heartland shaped the genetic structure of later Chinese populations.ResultsThis study reports 28 newly sequenced ancient human genomes from the Han Dynasty Xujiacundong and Zhouhe archaeological sites in Shandong Province, which are integrated with previously published regional datasets to investigate the genetic legacy of Neolithic Longshan populations in the formation of Han Chinese ancestry. Our analyses reveal pronounced genetic differentiation between Longshan populations from the Central Plain and lower Yellow River basin during the Late Neolithic period. Most individuals from the Xujiacundong site exhibit mixed ancestry, predominantly derived from Central Plain Longshan-related ancestry (93.8%) with a minor contribution from southeastern coastal China-related ancestry (6.2%). In contrast, all individuals from the Zhouhe site exhibit genetic homogeneity with Central Plain Longshan-related ancestry. These results indicate substantial genetic heterogeneity within the lower Yellow River basin during the Han Dynasty. Moreover, we found a high degree of genetic homogeneity between ancient Han Dynasty populations and modern Han Chinese from Shandong. Admixture modeling and f-statistics further demonstrate that Longshan-related ancestries—particularly those associated with the Central Plain—played a dominant role in shaping the genetic structure of historical populations across a wide geographic range, including the Upper Yellow River, the West Liao River Basin, and Southwest China, etc.ConclusionsThese findings underscore the profound and pervasive genetic influence of the Central Plain Longshan populations on surrounding regions, driving the demographic expansion and genetic homogenization of the Han Chinese. This interplay of population movements and cultural diffusion highlights the central role of Longshan-era demic expansion in shaping the genetic landscape and cohesion of the Han people.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12915-026-02541-7.

Carnelian beads in high-status burials of the Western Zhou period (ca. 1000-800 BCE) have long been seen as key evidence for long-distance exchange between East Asia and regions to the west, while their geological origins and circulation pathways have remained poorly constrained. Using a newly established geochemical database of 300 geological samples from 27 potential sources across Asia, we conducted trace-element analyses of 11 carnelian beads from the Sanxingdui pits (ca. 1200-1000 BCE), Sichuan Basin, southwest China. Canonical discriminant analysis indicates that the raw materials of these carnelian beads do not primarily derive from south China, but the Yanshan Orogeny, Central Asian Orogenic Belt and some unknown sources that might be close to Hexi Corridor, pointing to raw-material sources located over 1,000 km to the north of the Sichuan Basin. Comparative analyses of contemporaneous beads from Gansu, Shaanxi, and Beijing show similar northern provenance signatures, suggesting a broad and persistent exchange sphere spanning the southern Mongolian Plateau, Loess Plateau, eastern Tibetan Plateau, Central Plains, and Sichuan Basin between 1500-1000 BCE. Our results provide the earliest direct geochemical evidence for long-distance carnelian exchange in Bronze Age China and demonstrate the value of integrating geochemical sourcing with archaeological context to reconstruct ancient interaction networks.

The Hanging Coffin represents a distinctive mortuary tradition practiced across southern China, Southeast Asia (e.g., the Log Coffin), and the Pacific approximately 3,000 years. Historical records attribute this funerary practice to the Bo people, a group that largely disappeared from documented history by the end of the Ming Dynasty (1,368–1,644 AD). Here we report eleven ancient genomes from four Hanging Coffin sites in China, alongside thirty whole genomes from the extant Bo people in Southwest China. We also sequence four ancient genomes from Log Coffin sites in northwestern Thailand. Our findings indicate that present-day Bo people derive a substantial proportion of their ancestry from practitioners of the Hanging Coffin mortuary tradition. Both ancient and modern groups exhibit elevated genetic affinity with coastal Neolithic populations from southern East Asia, who are ancestral to Tai-Kadai and Austronesian speakers. Unexpectedly, we also find evidence of long-range interactions and cultural inclusivity between Northeast Asian and Yellow River farmers and Hanging Coffin communities over 1,200 years ago. Finally, shared genetic components between Hanging (Log) Coffin populations in China and Thailand point to a common origin and a broader genetic and cultural network underlying this distinctive mortuary tradition across southern China and Southeast Asia.

The Liangzhu culture, which emerged in the mid-Holocene Yangtze Delta, established one of East Asia's earliest cities. At its core site, Liangzhu, numerous worked human bones were unearthed from canal and moat deposits. These remains date from 5000 to 4550cal BP, with a concentration between 4800 and 4600cal BP. One notable characteristic of the worked human bones is the high proportion of unfinished items. This suggests that the bones selected for working may not have been particularly rare or symbolically privileged materials. In light of this, it is necessary to consider not only the possibility-commonly seen in global cases of worked human remains-that the bones came from ancestors or close kin, but also the possibility that the working was carried out with different intentions, possibly unrelated to ancestor worship. As the practice persisted for over 200 years, it appears to have been culturally embedded. The sudden appearance of such items-absent in earlier Neolithic China-may be closely related to Liangzhu's urban nature. Population growth and increasing social complexity may have altered interpersonal relationships, reshaping social and cultural views of "others" and the dead. These transformations likely formed the background for the emergence of practices involving the use of human bones as raw materials.