Source of unearthed pottery from the Qujialing culture in the middle Yangtze River

The Yangtze River Basin is a cradle of Chinese civilization. The production and distribution of pottery in this region during the Qujialing period is crucial for understanding how craft production, sociopolitical complexity, and technological advances are intricately linked and contributed to the formation and development of the Yangtze civilization. We report here a study of late Qujialing culture pottery from the Shangang, Gouwan, and Qujialing sites using chemical and mineralogical compositions and strontium isotope ratios. Principal component and cluster analyses suggest that each site mainly produced and consumed its own pottery. These results are consistent with strontium isotope analysis and trace (rare) element analysis, which revealed that the sources of the raw materials significantly differed among the 3 sites. The centralized mode of pottery production and distribution simply does not apply to study sites and their similar pottery styles.