Rui Bai, a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology, recently published two articles examining how prehistoric communities in China organized themselves thousands of years ago. The first, published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, analyzes burial practices at the Shixia site in southern China (ca. 5,000–4,000 years ago) and finds that this society maintained significant social differences through flexible, competitive strategies — without developing the rigid class hierarchies seen in other parts of ancient China. The second, published in Archaeological Research in Asia, uses social network analysis to investigate whether a 7,000-year-old village enclosed by twin ring ditches in Northeast China was divided into two cooperating social halves, a form of organization known as dual organization. By building networks from architectural features and artifact assemblages, the study finds that the two halves of the village maintained distinct building traditions while actively exchanging everyday goods — a pattern consistent with two complementary groups linked by marriage and economic cooperation. Together, these studies show that ancient Chinese societies developed a much wider range of social and political arrangements than traditional models of state formation suggest.

You can read the publications by clicking the links below: