Spatial and temporal changes of prehistoric human land use in the Wei River valley, northern China

Agricultural land use has been established as the dominant prehistoric human activity in early cultural centers for thousands of years. However, because of lack of data, there is still considerable debate about the amount and spatial distribution of prehistoric land use across the world. Quantitative reconstruction of it on the basis of human activity records, for example, archaeological data, is the key to resolving the issue. Here, we focus on one of the most representative regions for prehistoric human activity in northern China, the Wei River valley. Based on archaeological and environmental data, a recently developed quantitative prehistoric land use model (PLUM) is applied to reconstruct spatial and temporal changes of land use between 8 and 4 ka BP. The results reveal that in line with increases in the total number of archaeological sites (from 24 to 3222) and population (from 4000 to 1,550,000), the land area of the valley used by humans increased from 0.2% to 12% during the study interval, expanding from the gentle slopes along the lower reaches of the river to the middle and upper reaches. Meanwhile, the average population for an individual site increased from 160 to 481, but the average land use area per site decreased from 12.84 to 4.68 km2. Since 6 ka BP, the significant land use increase occurred synchronously in the Wei River valley and other key regions of agricultural origin across the world, which highlights the important role of agriculture activity in transforming the nature of global land cover during the prehistoric period.