Advances in Zooarchaeological and Biomolecular Approaches to the Study of Goats in Ancient China

Goats played important economic, ecological, and social roles in ancient China. After their initial domestication in western Eurasia, goats entered China through trans-Eurasian interaction networks and were gradually incorporated into diverse agropastoral systems, ritual practices, and regional economies. However, goats have often remained analytically obscured within broad categories such as “sheep/goat” or “ovicaprids”, while relevant evidence is dispersed across site-based faunal studies and multi-species biomolecular datasets. This review synthesizes research on ancient goats in China from four complementary perspectives: zooarchaeology, ancient DNA (aDNA), stable isotope analysis, and Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS). It brings together goat-specific evidence and reorganizes these data within a unified chronological, geographical, and ecological framework. Zooarchaeological evidence documents morphologically identified goat remains in northwestern and northern China dating to approximately 4300–3900 BP and in the Central Plains to approximately 3700 BP. Ancient DNA studies indicate that Chinese domestic goats derived from western Eurasian source populations rather than from independent local domestication. Stable isotope studies demonstrate that goat diets, mobility, and management strategies varied in relation to vegetation, millet agriculture, altitude, aridity, and pastoral organization. ZooMS offers an important means of resolving sheep/goat identification problems in fragmented assemblages, although its application to archaeological goats in China remains limited. Taken together, the evidence challenges a simple diffusion-centered narrative. After entering China, goats were repeatedly reconfigured through regionally specific combinations of ecological constraints, human management, economic organization, and cultural practice, making China an important comparative landscape for understanding the transformation of introduced livestock across regions.