Center for Archaeological Science, Sichuan University publishes new perspectives in Land magazine on hunter-gatherers permanently occupying high-altitude areas of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

Over the past decade, when humans permanently occupied the high-altitude areas of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and no longer migrated between high and low lands has been the focus of archaeological attention. The mainstream view is that permanent human occupation of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau only became possible after the introduction of wheat agriculture around 3600 years ago. To address this major academic issue, the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau archaeological team of Sichuan University and the Cultural Relics Institute of the Tibet Autonomous Region have jointly carried out a series of field archaeological works in eastern, central, and western Tibet in recent years. On the one hand, they have revealed the contribution of Neolithic people in the southeastern edge of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau to permanent occupation at an earlier stage (around 5000 years ago). On the other hand, through the excavation of several sites in the middle reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo River, they have clarified that wheat agriculture only became the dominant crop on the plateau around 3000 years ago. To further assess the contribution of hunter-gatherers to the permanent occupation of the plateau, since 2019, the team has carried out intensive archaeological surveys and excavations in extremely high-altitude areas (above 4000 meters) in western Tibet, and has achieved a series of important gains. Recently, the team has published a series of research results in magazines such as Antiquity and Land, putting forward new viewpoints on the landscape utilization and permanent occupation of hunter-gatherers in the western Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in the early Holocene.

On September 11, the Center for Archaeological Science, Sichuan University team published a paper entitled "Permanent Human Occupation of the Western Tibetan Plateau in the Early Holocene" in the journal Land in the field of environmental science and ecology. The first author is Professor Lv Hongliang of the Center for Archaeological Science, and the co-author is Li Ziyan, a 2024 graduate student of the School of Archaeology and Museology of Sichuan University (a doctoral student at Washington University in St. Louis). The paper points out that the key to this debate first depends on how we understand permanent occupation and the excavation and understanding of archaeological evidence. The study believes that there are very few specific sites on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau that are occupied all year round. When discussing permanent occupation of the plateau, the focus should be shifted to the permanent occupation of the plateau landscape, rather than the permanent occupation of individual sites. Under this idea, the permanent occupation of the plateau landform by early hunter-gatherers is entirely possible, and there are many similar examples in other high-altitude areas in the world.

In the past ten years or so, academic research on land use patterns in high-altitude areas has mainly focused on the northeastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Archaeological surveys have revealed the traces of dozens of hunter-gatherer sites distributed along lakeshores and river terraces from 14,000 to 6,000 years ago. Travel cost simulations and ethnoarchaeological analogies also show that these hunter-gatherer groups may have seasonal migrations between low-altitude and high-altitude areas. Scholars believe that these sites are likely to be certain nodes of the foraging system developed in the marginal areas of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, and also the basis for colonization to high altitudes. However, studying when humans permanently occupied the harsh environment of the higher-altitude western Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is a rather arduous task due to the difficulty of field work and the accumulation of data.

Since the launch of the cultural relics census in 1992, archaeologists from Sichuan University and the Tibet Autonomous Region have discovered more than 20 microlithic sites in extremely high-altitude areas (above 4000 meters) in western Tibet, but very few of them have been systematically excavated and absolutely dated. In 2019, the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau archaeological team of Sichuan University launched a project on the early settlement archaeology of western Tibet, reviewing these surface collection sites discovered more than ten years ago, and successfully identified a series of early sites with in-situ burial.

This article mainly reports the results of the survey of Xiadacuo, Qusongguo and Dingzhong Huzhuzi in Ali Prefecture, and focuses on the technical analysis and absolute dating of the stone tool assemblage to discuss the mobility and land use patterns of hunter-gatherers in the western Plateau in the early Holocene. Through the comparison of stone tool analysis, it is found that the stone tools of the above three hunter-gatherer sites dating back to 10,000-8,000 years ago have highly similar technical characteristics. Comprehensive analysis of surrounding archaeological evidence and travel cost model analysis, the study believes that hunter-gatherers in western Tibet in the early Holocene were already very familiar with the plateau landscape, able to obtain key resources from different areas of the plateau, and may have had a long-distance obsidian exchange network, and had the ability to permanently occupy the plateau landscape. Specific locations distributed in different ecological niches may be specific sites of different seasons and functions left by hunter-gatherers in the plateau activities.

The study also pointed out that this view is currently a working hypothesis and requires a large number of detailed field surveys and excavations to obtain a more detailed picture of the activities of hunter-gatherers on the plateau. Recent work by different domestic teams has successively confirmed that before the introduction of domesticated crops, hunter-gatherers in different regions of the plateau had diverse lifestyles. Among them, the field work of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau team of Sichuan University at the Xiadacuo site in western Tibet will provide key evidence for verifying this hypothesis.