Abstract
Cowrie seashells are among objects regularly unearthed from the Bronze Age (2nd-1st millennium BCE) elite graves in the Yellow River valley. The problem of the place of their origin has puzzled scholars since the first half of the 20th century.
For a long time, the most influential hypothesis searched for it on the southeastern seashore of modern China. This view was challenged by Peng and Zhu (1995) who suggested that the seashells were obtained through long-distance contacts with Central Asia and the steppes. This suggestion was based on the thoroughgoing consideration of the finds of the seashells in the territory of modern China which revealed that their earliest finds concentrate in the region of the Chinese Northwest (Gansu and Qinghai).
However, it should be emphasized that the distribution of these earliest finds shows strong bias toward high-elevation areas on the northeastern fringes of the Tibetan Plateau. This, together with occurrence of the seashells on the southeastern rim of the Plateau at the same time, suggests the region to the southeast of the Plateau - i.e., the Southwestern China - as one of the main areas from which the shells were acquired by the Late Neolithic cultures in the modern Qinghai and Gansu Provinces.
While sources of the cowries found within a broader territory of modern China were probably various, these considerations suggest that the Chinese Southwest, which in later historical periods was a center of the trade with the cowries, had an important role in their distribution since the prehistoric period.