The study, conducted by Shi Jie Zhu of Yale University’s Department of Anthropology, adopts a methodological framework known as the chaîne opératoire approach to mortuary analysis, adapted from Anke Hein’s 2017 work on prehistoric graves in southwest China. Rather than treating tombs as static containers of wealth, this approach examines burials as the outcome of sequences of social practices, each stage shaped by the decisions of the mourners who performed them. Grave construction, the process of body interment, the selection and arrangement of grave goods, and the spatial location of graves and cemeteries across the landscape are all treated as meaningful actions that can be reconstructed and compared. This stands in deliberate contrast to conventional interpretations that infer social status primarily from the quantity and quality of grave goods, a method that has tended to produce images of rigid, multi-tiered social pyramids in the Liangzhu literature.

The Liangzhu culture, which flourished during the late Neolithic period in the lower Yangtze region, is renowned for its extraordinary jade craftsmanship, its densely clustered settlement landscape, and above all for the massive hydraulic system built on the periphery of the Liangzhu ancient city. Previous research, including a landmark 2018 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, dated this water management enterprise to around 5,100 years ago, making it one of the earliest large-scale hydraulic projects known anywhere in the world. Dams, levees, and canals required the coordination of enormous quantities of labor and materials, raising a question that has long preoccupied archaeologists: what kind of social organization could mobilize, organize, and sustain such collective effort? The new study addresses this question directly by asking whether and how social differentiation within the site complex changed during the periods immediately surrounding the hydraulic construction.

Zhu’s chronological comparison of burial practices yields a striking result. During the Early Liangzhu period, differences among graves and cemeteries existed, but they appear to reflect various forms of group identity, with distinct communities differentiating themselves through particular combinations of grave forms, burial treatments, and object assemblages. The patterns suggest that access to labor and to raw material resources was distributed unevenly across the landscape, but not yet consolidated into a single, tightly ranked hierarchy. Different burying groups, in other words, drew on different pools of resources and followed somewhat different funerary traditions, producing a mosaic of local practices rather than a uniform social order.

That mosaic changed during the early Middle Liangzhu period, the very phase marked by the construction of the large-scale hydraulic system near the site complex. The analysis indicates that several communities and individuals began to attain distinct access to various resources and possibly to social power during this time. In practical terms, this means that certain grave loci show enhanced investment in construction, more elaborate interment procedures, and assemblages that signal privileged relationships with jade, fine ceramics, and other valued materials, while other contemporary loci do not. The timing is significant: the widening of these distinctions coincides with the phase of monumental water management and urban construction that defines Liangzhu’s place among the world’s early civilizations.

The study’s findings point toward a reciprocal relationship between social differentiation and collective enterprise. Rather than a powerful centralized authority simply imposing monumental projects on a subordinate population, the evidence from the burial record suggests that increasing differentiation within the site complex itself contributed to the coordination of labor and resources necessary for large-scale hydraulic and urban construction. Communities and individuals who gained distinctive access to resources may have played crucial roles in organizing work parties, provisioning participants, and legitimizing their positions through the very display of controlled materials in funerary contexts. In this reading, the elaborate graves of the Middle Liangzhu period are not merely reflections of pre-existing rank but active participants in the making of a society capable of remaking its landscape.

Technically, the chaîne opératoire framework allows the researcher to decompose each burial into analytically separable stages. Grave construction can be assessed through pit dimensions, depth, and any architectural elaboration. Body interment processes encompass the treatment of the corpse, including its orientation and positioning. Object assemblages are examined not simply for total value but for the composition of materials, the presence of specific artifact classes such as jades and ceramics, and their placement within the grave. Finally, spatial analysis considers where graves and entire cemeteries sit relative to settlements, waterways, and the Liangzhu city itself. Considering all these dimensions together, across five sites and two chronological phases, produces a dataset rich enough to distinguish community-level traditions from individual expressions of distinction, something that grave-good counts alone cannot achieve.

The approach also challenges a persistent assumption in reconstructions of Liangzhu society, namely that the famous elite cemeteries with their spectacular jade assemblages represent the top of a rigid, vertically ranked hierarchy that characterized the culture from its beginnings. The new analysis indicates that such reconstructions oversimplify a more dynamic process. Social differentiation during the early Middle Liangzhu period was not a single ladder with fixed rungs but a changing configuration of communities and individuals, each negotiating access to different kinds of resources, labor, and possibly ritual authority. Some distinctions were grounded in differential access to raw materials; others expressed group identities that did not map neatly onto a wealth scale. It was only over time, the study suggests, that some of these distinctions hardened into more durable and consequential forms of social power.

The broader significance of the research extends beyond the Liangzhu case. Archaeologists studying the emergence of social complexity worldwide have long debated whether inequality arises primarily through control of prestige goods, through managerial roles in collective projects, or through the gradual accumulation of hereditary advantage. The Liangzhu burial evidence speaks to all three debates at once, because the hydraulic system and the changing funerary record belong to the same historical moment. Here was a society that, within the span of a few generations, transformed both its landscape and its internal social structure, and the graves of its people preserve the traces of that transformation. For the Neolithic world, the Liangzhu site complex now appears not as a culture that simply inherited hierarchy, but as one in which inequality and monumental capability grew together, each feeding the other in a feedback loop that ultimately produced one of East Asia’s earliest urban civilizations.

The study’s datasets, derived from published excavation reports of sites including Fanshan, Yaoshan, Bianjiashan, and others within or near the site complex, are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request, ensuring that the interpretation of these 82 burials can be scrutinized and extended by future researchers. As Liangzhu continues to attract global attention since its inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List as an archaeological site attesting to early urban civilization in China, research of this kind demonstrates how careful, practice-oriented mortuary analysis can turn even the most familiar burial assemblages into new evidence. The dead of the Liangzhu wetlands, it turns out, still have much to say about how the first cities and their great waterworks came to be.

Subject of Research: Changing social differentiation during the middle Liangzhu period as revealed by burial practices at diverse grave sites near the Liangzhu site complex.

Article Title: Changing social differentiation during the middle Liangzhu period: clues from diverse burial loci

Article References: Zhu, S. J. (2026). Changing social differentiation during the middle Liangzhu period: clues from diverse burial loci. Asian Archaeology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41826-026-00131-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s41826-026-00131-8

Keywords: Liangzhu culture, Late Neolithic, mortuary analysis, social differentiation, burial practices, hydraulic system, jade, social hierarchy, Yangtze delta, chaîne opératoire, ancient China, archaeology

Utrecht occupies a special place in medieval Dutch ceramic history. The earliest evidence for pottery production there dates to the late 12th century CE, and by the 14th century the town had joined Haarlem, Leiden and Breda as a major manufacturing centre supplying both local markets and wider regional trade. Its products have been recovered as far afield as Alkmaar, Haarlem, Dordrecht and Amsterdam. The workshops themselves clustered in the suburbs of Bemuurde Weerd and Tolsteeg, north and south of the town walls, and along the banks of the Vecht river, where excavations have uncovered nine vertical updraft kilns with brick or clay floors, round or oval in plan and measuring up to five metres long.

The excavated waste heaps tell a story of technological transition. The first production phase at Zeedijk, dated 1150 to 1175 CE, yielded almost exclusively grey, round-based jars. After an apparent hiatus of roughly a century, the second phase, from 1275 to 1350 CE, saw a wider repertoire including lead-glazed reddish tripod forms, jugs, bowls and pans, though grey jars remained dominant. By the third phase, represented by the Oosterkade workshop (1350 to 1400 CE) and riverside workshops such as Anthoniedijk, Hogelanden and Lauwerecht (1375 to 1425 CE), lead-glazed redware had become far more prominent, and unglazed and lead-glazed floor tiles were also being produced.

To characterise the raw materials and firing technology, the team subjected the 59 samples, plus one clay sample from a waste pit at Bemuurde Weerd, to a battery of techniques: polarised light optical microscopy, wavelength-dispersive X-ray fluorescence spectrometry, X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry. Thin-section petrography revealed two main fabric groups, a Coarse Group with large, moderately to poorly sorted quartz inclusions and a Fine Group with smaller, better-sorted inclusions. The size, rounded shape and bimodal distribution of the coarse quartz grains suggest they were deliberately added as temper, most likely derived from fluvial deposits, consistent with the Holocene river clays of the region.

The chemical data, measured on 26 major, minor and trace elements at the Fitch Laboratory of the British School at Athens, showed a strongly homogeneous, silico-aluminous dataset pointing to local clay sources. Principal component analysis identified three compositional groups, with a large, homogeneous group A accounting for more than 70 percent of the samples. All the Utrecht products were made from calcium-poor, iron-rich clay, with calcium contents below 2.5 percent, and the chemical similarity between the fired clay sample and the pottery, despite differences in calcium, may itself be evidence of quartz tempering. X-ray diffraction confirmed the mineral assemblage of quartz, illite-muscovite, K-feldspar and plagioclase, with redware bodies generally containing more hematite than greyware.

Firing temperatures emerged as consistently low. Most of the ceramics, 44 of them, were fired below 800 degrees Celsius, while a handful containing the high-temperature minerals gehlenite, diopside and mullite may have reached roughly 850 to 900 degrees or slightly above. The co-occurrence of surviving calcite and dolomite with these high-temperature phases implies short soaking times in the kiln. The glazes told their own story: single-layered, transparent coatings up to about 250 micrometres thick, of very high to high-lead type, with lead oxide contents between roughly 51 and 69 weight percent. Comparisons of corrected glaze and body compositions indicate that potters mixed lead oxide with silica before application, and that the yellowish-brown to greenish colour came from iron in the glaze over the reddish ceramic body.

The most novel element of the study was the application of small-angle neutron scattering, or SANS, to the question of how the vessels were formed. Measured non-destructively at the YS-SANS instrument of the Budapest Neutron Centre, 38 jar samples yielded data on the orientation and alignment of nanoscale domains in the ceramic fabric, which record the forces applied during forming. Thirty-two samples showed high isotropy values, indicating disorganised internal structures characteristic of percussion-building techniques such as pinching, moulding or tamper-and-concave-anvil forming. Combined with the wheel-made traces on rims and necks, this points to a two-stage strategy the authors call percussion-wheeling: the body formed by percussion, then the neck and rim refined on a rotational device.

Only six samples showed the low isotropy and significant tilting angles diagnostic of other techniques. One redware jar from the second phase at Zeedijk proved to be coil-built and wheel-shaped, while five jars, from both Zeedijk and Oudenoord, were genuinely wheel-thrown, three with clockwise and two with anticlockwise wheel rotation. Notably, all the wheel-thrown examples date to the second production phase after about 1275 CE, confirming a previously observed typo-technological shift from grey hand-formed jars to reddish tripod forms. Contrary to common expectations, the potters did not favour fine fabrics for wheel-throwing; nearly all the wheel-thrown jars were made from the coarse fabric. The persistence of percussion-wheeling across the 100-year hiatus between the first and second phases suggests a conservative, culturally embedded technological tradition, one perhaps also suited to producing the round-based jar shapes that were difficult to throw on a wheel.

The study also cautions against reading forming techniques from surface features alone. Interior depressions often interpreted as fingertip impressions from moulding appeared on wheel-thrown vessels too, and may instead reflect hands supporting the vessel wall during brushing, while interior ridges below the neck, sometimes taken as evidence of added coils, also occurred on wheel-thrown jars and may result from clay displacement during wheel work. The reasons for discarding the wasters were largely firing failures: warping and cracking from overfiring, loosened tripod legs and handles, and glazes accidentally fired in a reducing atmosphere. Taken together, the results portray a production tradition defined by both continuity and change, in which local potters favoured iron-rich, calcium-poor clay, tempered it with river sand, fired at low temperatures, and gradually adopted wheel-throwing and lead glazing, offering archaeologists a new quantitative template for reconstructing medieval craft knowledge and its transmission.

Subject of Research: The production technology and chaîne opératoire of medieval greyware and redware ceramics from 12th to 15th century Utrecht, the Netherlands

Article Title: Advancing the chaîne opératoire analysis of medieval greyware and redware ceramics: A case study from 12th to 15th centuries CE Utrecht, the Netherlands

Article References: Borgers, B., Gait, J., Bajnok, K., Allepuz, E. T., Bajnóczi, B., Len, A., & Griffioen, A. (2026). Advancing the chaîne opératoire analysis of medieval greyware and redware ceramics: A case study from 12th to 15th centuries CE Utrecht, the Netherlands. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 18(9), Article 194. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-026-02554-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12520-026-02554-x

Keywords: medieval pottery, Utrecht, chaîne opératoire, ceramic technology, greyware, redware, small-angle neutron scattering, lead glazes, petrography, X-ray fluorescence, pottery workshops, the Netherlands