Wood use strategies and settlement intensity of the earliest Neolithic populations on the eastern Tibetan Plateau: Evidence from Konglongcun site

• Charcoal taxa indicate local wood gathering from trees typical of the eastern Tibetan Plateau margin. • Late-phase wood use shifted toward fresher fuel, larger dismeters, adn more small-diameter Pyrus sp. • Wood-use changes point to intensified farming and increasing sedentism in the early Neolithic. The dispersal of prehistoric agricultural cultures onto the Tibetan Plateau and their adaptation to its extreme environments remain key scientific questions. The western Sichuan Plateau, located on the eastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau, served as a critical corridor for the spread of agriculture, yet the subsistence strategies together with the degree of sedentism among early Neolithic populations in this region remains unclear. The charcoal analysis from archaeological sites can well reveal the strategies of human wood gathering, indirectly reflecting the intensity of past human activities. The Konglongcun site (孔龙村遗址) (ca. 5500–4800 cal. BP)—one of the earliest millet-farming Neolithic sites on the western Sichuan Plateau—provides an opportunity to investigate changes in wood exploitation and human activity through taxonomic identification, diameter estimation, and decay-index analysis of charcoal remains. The study findings indicated that Konglongcun inhabitants primarily adopted a local procurement strategy, exploiting dominant regional taxa, such as Abies sp., Pinus sp., and Acer sp. Climate reconstruction based on the coexistence approach suggested warmer and wetter conditions during the site’s occupation than the present conditions, favoring thermophilic millet cultivation. The late phase showed a significant increase in the use of fresh wood, larger collected wood diameters, and a stronger preference for exploiting Pyrus sp. as fresh twigs than in the early phase, implying intensified agricultural activity and great sedentism. This study presents the first systematic evidence of wood exploitation by early Neolithic populations on the eastern Tibetan Plateau, offering new insights into how agricultural communities adapted to high-altitude environments during their expansion onto the plateau.