The Drinks Are on Us: Ritual, Social Status, and Practice in Dawenkou Burials, North China

This paper investigates mortuary remains as the material component of past ritual behavior in the Neolithic Dawenkou Culture of North China. By examining the ritual function of ceramic burial goods and their spatial relationships within graves, the author argues that an ideology of competitive funerary ritual developed in Dawenkou and society during the period 5000-2500 B.C. Such an ideology may have been a contributing factor in the development of social complexity in northern coastal China.