Early Complex Societies in Northern China phase, followed by Longshan (Late Neolithic) and then by Shang (Early Bronze Age)(Liang Siyong 1933). In the late 1950s, archaeologists in China and the United States independently developed the idea of a nuclear area in the North China Plain from which Chinese civilisation arose, with Longshan developing out of Yangshao and spreading to the east (eg, Chang 1959b; Shi Xingbang 1959). Chang further hypothesised the outwards spread of a “Lungshanoid horizon” from an eastern China centre (Chang 1959a), a concept that he later abandoned as more complete archaeological data from other parts of China became available (Chang 1986: 238–9).

This rather exclusive focus on the North China Plain finally began to change in 1979, when Su Bingqi (1909–97), a senior archaeologist at Peking University who used a growing body of Neolithic data from an ever-widening geographic area, laid out his idea of “regional systems and local culture types”(quxi leixing 区系类型), by which there was mutual cultural interaction among the distinct Neolithic cultures of the Yellow and Yangzi River valleys (Su & Yin 1981; Wang 1997). Identifying the regional cultural-chronological framework of the Early, Middle and Late Neolithic periods, and interaction between regional cultures and subphases, remain at the core of current archaeological studies across China today, particularly in comparative studies of the development of cultural complexity during the Late Prehistoric Period.