Geostatistical and geoarchaeological study of Holocene floodplains and site distributions on the Sha-Ying River Basin, Central China

Geostatistics has become a powerful method for investigating complex spatial variations of prehistoric settlements in floodplains and other geomorphological settings. A geoarchaeological drilling program that covers most of the Sha-Ying River Basin provides a rare opportunity with unusually detailed environmental data to contest and develop the geostatistics method, which proves to be essential, in combination with archaeological data, to understand long-term (9000–2500 B.P.) patterns of human inhabitation and adaption to volatile floodplain environments in eastern Central China. We analysed the variography and multivariate ordination of the borehole data and explored the complexities of landform evolution, with reference to sedimentation processes and soil development in the floodplain of the Sha-Ying River. The recurrent impact of river floods on regional landforms is manifested by spatial-autocorrelated properties over distances up to 10 km, sometimes with directional trends. We then developed a model of landform evolution through kriging and compared the model with detailed reconstruction of archaeological settlement patterns. Our results illustrate long-term socio-environmental dynamics by which human communities first populated and then adapted in diverse ways to the changing floodplain environments from the early to middle Holocene. This improved method will have far-reaching implications for future studies on similar geomorphological settings across vast floodplains of Central China and other global regions.