Land tenure and multi-seasonal sequential harvesting revealed by archaeobotanical and isotopic studies at Erdaojingzi, a Bronze Age site in Northeast China

• Integrating crop processing analysis (archaeobotany) and plant stable isotopic analysis to investigate agricultural practice and corresponding labor organization with finer resolution of prehistoric communities. • Millet cultivation at Bronze Age Erdaojingzi in Northeast China was likely organized at a household level, the products were shared among household members. • Direct evidence of the autonomy in decision-making and land tenure-ship within each household in the agricultural production of Bronze Age North China. • Morphological and isotopic evidence provide the circumstantial evidence of multi-seasonal harvesting regime of Chinese millet in ancient times. In this research, stable isotope analysis of plants was integrated with macrofossil studies to investigate social conditions underpinning millet cultivation and mundane food production at the Bronze Age village Erdaojingzi (3600–3500 cal. yr BP), Northeast China. Specifically, we sought to answer two questions: 1) Did different households (or other groupings) manage cultivation collectively in similar environments, or did house groups have unequal access to (or ownership of) different farmlands? 2) Were millet harvests organized according to house group distinctions, or were they equally distributed among households? How were crops harvested in the field within this social context? Our results seem to suggest that both cultivation and harvest were configured in the context of the household economy. Millet was cultivated in environments only accessible to certain house groups, while the products were shared among household members rather than pooled across the whole community. The correlation between morphologically attested grain sizes and isotopic results indicated circumstances that grains from the same family plot were harvested multiple times sequentially, rather than in a single seasonal harvesting regime. Extensive archaeobotanical sampling at Erdaojingzi has enabled fine-grained analysis of how millet cultivation and production were woven into social conditions operating both in the field and within the settlement.