> ...a network of ceramic water pipes and drainage ditches at the Chinese walled site of Pingliangtai dating back 4,000 years to a time known as the Longshan period.
Reaction: If the site was "walled" (and not somehow occupied after the builders simply abandoned it), then obviously the engineering skills and social organization for large-scale infrastructure construction did exist.
> The level of complexity associated with these pipes refutes an earlier understanding in archaeological fields that holds that only a centralized state power with governing elites would be able to muster the organization and resources to build a complex water management system.
Reaction: That "earlier understanding" sounds very comfortable and convenient, if you are an archaeologist with elitist social biases, or dependent on support from members of a social elite, or who is a member of his society's social elite. Wealthy and powerful people rationalizing that poor and oppressed people somehow "needed" them was already an old trope when the first pyramid was built.
Reaction: If the site was "walled" (and not somehow occupied after the builders simply abandoned it), then obviously the engineering skills and social organization for large-scale infrastructure construction did exist.
> The level of complexity associated with these pipes refutes an earlier understanding in archaeological fields that holds that only a centralized state power with governing elites would be able to muster the organization and resources to build a complex water management system.
Reaction: That "earlier understanding" sounds very comfortable and convenient, if you are an archaeologist with elitist social biases, or dependent on support from members of a social elite, or who is a member of his society's social elite. Wealthy and powerful people rationalizing that poor and oppressed people somehow "needed" them was already an old trope when the first pyramid was built.