Craft Specialization in the Highland Longshan Society: Perspective from the Bone Needle Workshop on the Central Mound at the Shimao Site, Shaanxi, China

•Prehistoric economy at Shimao.•Archaeology of craft specialization.•The chaîne opératoire of bone needle production.•Transition from Late Neolithic to Bronze Age economy in East Asia. The emergence of Shimao, a proto-urban center at the contact zone between agropastoral communities of the Loess Plateau and herders/hunter-gatherers of Monogolian Plateau, offers critical insights into the economic activities during the transition to the Bronze Age in continental East Asia. Unprecedented in scale in prehistoric China, the bone needle workshop at the central mound was a prelude to the specialized, industrial-scale bone production workshops seen in the Bronze Age cities of Zhengzhou, Anyang, and Zhouyuan during the second and early first millennium BCE. The bone needle production at Huangchengtai probably supplied a sophisticated craft industry for the production of garments using animal hides and textiles.