This book presents the earliest evidence of the domestication of rice and of human settlement in the Neolithic Era discovered at the Shangshan site.  The excavation of the Shangshan site has yielded insights into the origin of Chinese rice culture. The author presents a comprehensive account of the Shangshan site, employing concise and literary language to elucidate the 10,000-year foundation of Chinese civilization.

Leping Jiang, originally from Zhuji, Zhejiang Province, now lives in Hangzhou, is a Professor at the Institute of Cultural Heritage and Archaeology of Zhejiang Province. He graduated from the Department of Anthropology at Sun Yat-sen University, majoring in archaeology, and has been working in the archaeological research of the Neolithic period for a long time. He has presided over the excavation of two important Neolithic sites: the Shangshan site in Pujiang and the Kuahuqiao site in Xiaoshan, and the archaeological cultures represented by these two sites have been named the Shangshan Culture and the Kuahuqiao Culture respectively. He has published more than 70 research papers in academic journals at home and abroad, as well as 8 research reports and monographs, among which Kuahuqiao was honored as one of the “National Top Ten Literature and Museum Books” in 2004.

Liye Xie is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Arizona in 2014. An anthropological archaeologist with interdisciplinary training, Dr. Xie works within and critically engages China's historically oriented archaeological tradition. Her research examines the co-construction of technology and society in Neolithic and Early Bronze Age China, with particular attention to how material practices and early social organization shaped one another.