The earliest meteoritic iron artefact of the Chinese Bronze Age discovered at Sanxingdui, Southwest China

Background: Bronze spears are weapons with unique regional characteristics of the Shu culture, Southwest China in the Bronze Age, which reflect the bronze manufacturing tradition and the utilization of mineral resources of ancestors. Previous studies mainly focused on the classification, the alloy composition, or the production of bronze spearheads of the Shu culture. The purpose of this paper was to make a comprehensive discussion on the Shu culture from the aspects of the relationship between typology and scientific characteristics, the differences in metal raw material selection with the Ba culture, and the contact with the culture in the Central Plains. Methods: In this study, typology, portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (pXRF) and multicollector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (MC-ICP-MS) were used to analyze thirteen bronze spearheads unearthed from Shuangyuan site, an Eastern Zhou cemetery in Chengdu City, Sichuan Province, Southwest China. Results: The results show that the spearheads can be classified into three types in typology. All samples are tin-lead ternary bronzes, and the lead isotope data indicate the lead ore. Most spearheads show ordinary lead, and only one spearhead has highly radiogenic lead. Conclusion: The typical Shu-style bronze spearheads have distinct shapes but similar ore materials. Meanwhile, people of the Ba culture and the Shu culture used different metal sources to make bronze spearheads. In addition, a very special bronze spearhead suggests that ancestors of the Shu culture in the Eastern Zhou Dynasty imitated the late Shang culture in the Central Plains.

Reconstructing ancient diets and the use of animals and plants augment our understanding of how humans adapted to different environments. Yunnan Province in southwest China is ecologically and environmentally diverse. During the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods, this region was occupied by a variety of local culture groups with diverse subsistence systems and material culture. In this paper, we obtained carbon (δ13C) and nitrogen (δ15N) isotopic ratios from human and faunal remains in order to reconstruct human paleodiets and strategies for animal exploitation at the Bronze Age site of Shilinggang (ca. 2500 Cal BP) in northwest Yunnan Province. The δ13C results for human samples from Shilinggang demonstrate that people’s diets were mainly dominated by C3-based foodstuffs, probably due to both direct consumption of C3 food and as a result of C3 foddering of consumed animals. Auxiliary C4 food signals can also be detected. High δ15N values indicate that meat was an important component of the diet. Analysis of faunal samples indicates that people primarily fed pigs and dogs with human food waste, while sheep/goats and cattle were foddered with other food sources. We compare stable isotope and archaeobotanical data from Shilinggang with data from other Bronze Age sites in Yunnan to explore potential regional variation in subsistence strategies. Our work suggests that people adopted different animal utilization and subsistence strategies in different parts of Yunnan during the Bronze Age period, probably as local adaptations to the highly diversified and isolated environments in the region.

Reviewed by: Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities on the Southern Frontier, c. 400 B.C.E.–50 C.E. by Erica Brindley Francis Allard Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities on the Southern Frontier, c. 400 B.C.E.–50 C.E. Erica Brindley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 302pp, 12 b/w illustrations, 3 maps, 3 tables, Bibliography, Index. US $103.00. ISBN 9781316355282. It is fair to say that substantially more has been written about China’s northern neighbors in pre- and early imperial times than about its early southern populations. This is perhaps not surprising, considering the perpetual need of Bronze Age and later dynasties to monitor, engage, and appease those powerful and mobile steppe polities that agitated at their doorstep. In contrast, not only was the south geographically distant from the dynastic centers of the Central Plains, it never emerged as a serious military threat. Textual, archaeological, and linguistic data combine to paint China’s vast southern region (from the Yangzi River to northern Vietnam) as a highly segmented ethnic landscape populated by mostly small-scale, pre-literate populations who spoke non-sinitic languages. The absence of any coordinated resistance to – or possibly even awareness of – the southern march of armies is evident from the recorded speed at which China’s early empires managed to incorporate the southern regions into their realms. Thus, by 214 b.c.e., Lingnan (consisting of present-day Guangdong and Guangxi) in southeast China had become part of the Qin empire, while troops dispatched one century later by the Han emperor Wudi are said to have taken no more than 3 years to reach and conquer a vast swath of territory covering present-day Fujian (along the southeast coast), Lingnan, northern and central Vietnam, and portions of Yunnan (in southwest China), all of which were soon partitioned into commanderies and constituent counties. Viewed from a comfortable historical distance, these early southern campaigns take on the appearance of effortless expansion which laid the foundation for the subsequent political integration and sinicization of China’s southern populations. In reality, however, the process of military, administrative, and cultural incorporation was also marked by serious challenges. Contemporary and later texts refer to regular and occasionally successful native uprisings, as well as debates at court regarding the wisdom of administering and holding on to such distant regions. Still, even as historical studies of the south have incorporated into their narratives details of these setbacks and the tasks faced by imperial [End Page 262] officials and military personnel, meta-accounts of China’s enlargement south of the Yangzi have viewed the expansion primarily as an inevitable sinicization process, the outcome of which was achieved through the gradual but insistent replacement of native political and cultural forms. Thus, while early western accounts of the expansion – most notably Herold Wiens’ (1954) China’s March Toward the Tropics and C.P. FitzGerald’s (1972) The Southern Expansion of the Chinese People – differ in regard to the manner in which native society was altered through sustained contact with Chinese soldiers, officials, traders, and colonists, they remain consistent in their adherence to the fundamental assumptions of the sinicization model. The view of early China’s southern region as an uneven ethnospace whose weak constituent populations were irreversibly drawn into the Chinese political and cultural sphere is now tempered by research conducted on more recent periods by western historians and anthropologists. This scholarship – much of it focused on ethnic groups located in southwest China – offers a more critical assessment of China’s infiltration of native territories by calling attention to the crucial fact that native acculturation to Chinese customs and views remained very much incomplete as recently as a few hundred years ago in some peripheral areas. Beyond the obvious relevance of such findings to discussions of earlier periods, these studies also highlight the reality that military, administrative, and cultural borders were likely never coterminous. These recent studies rely on a number of ideas (i.e., resistance, identity, acculturation, hybridization, agency) developed by Western scholars interested in the fate of peripheral populations that have been impacted by imperial expansion or touched by economic and cultural currents flowing from...

Early Bronze in Northeastern Thailand

The emergence and intensification of transcontinental exchange during both the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age profoundly influenced the social history of Eurasia. While scholars have intensively discussed east-west long-distance communication along the proto-Silk Road, the north-south transport networks that connected China to South and Southeast Asia during the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age have attracted much less attention in the scholarly literature based on archeological science data. In this paper, we find new radiocarbon dates from 11 Neolithic and Bronze Age sites in northwestern and central Yunnan in Southwest China, a key entrance into South and Southeast Asia from China. Combined with previously published archeological records and radiocarbon dates, we attempt to disentangle and understand the timing and routes of the networks linking China to South and Southeast Asia during the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age. We propose three north-south land routes that played essential roles in the cultural exchanges in addition to the proto-Silk Road and maritime routes. This includes the trans-Himalayan routes, trans-Hengduan Mountain routes, and the trans-Yunnan–Guizhou Plateau routes. The north-south exchange between China and South and Southeast Asia probably emerged in the fifth millennium BP (before the present) mainly through a low-frequency trans-Yunnan–Guizhou Plateau and trans-Himalayan routes. The exchange frequency significantly increased after the fourth millennium BP, with the synchronous development of the three primary north-south passageways. Trans-Hengduan routes might have been the most crucial artery connecting China and South and Southeast Asia during 3000–2200 BP, but more archeological records are needed to understand the detailed evolution of these transport networks.

Bridging the time gap in the Bronze Age of Southeast Asia and Southwest China

Introduction: Diffusionism, Migration, and the Archaeology of the Chinese Border Regions (Anke Hein) The Life and Work of Tong Enzheng (Lothar von Falkenhausen) Rethinking the Crescent-Shaped Cultural-Contact Belt (Lu Hongliang and Zha Xiaoying) The Site of Karuo and the Emergence of Agriculture on the Tibetan Plateau (Li Yongxian) Emergence of Neolithic Communities on the Northeastern Tibetan Plateau: Evidence from the Zongri Cultural Sites (Ling-yu Hung, Jianfeng Cui, and Honghai Chen) The Emergence and Chronology of Early Bronzes on the Eastern Rim of the Tibetan Plateau (Kazuo Miyamoto) Metal, Salt, and Horse Skulls: Elite-Level Exchange and Long-Distance Human Movement in Prehistoric Yanyuan (Southwest China) (Anke Hein) Spiral Handle and Three-Pronged Guard: Stylistic or Technical Traits? (Tzehuey Chiou-Peng) The Site of Haimenkou: New Research on the Chronology of the Early Bronze Age in Yunnan (Li Kunsheng and Min Rui) Early Subsistence Practices at Prehistoric Dadunzi in Yuanmou, Yunnan: New Evidence for the Origins of Early Agriculture in Southwest China (Jin Hetian, Liu Xu, Min Rui, Li Xiaorui, and Wu Xiaohong) Author Biographies

The authors report on new discoveries from Sanxingdui in south-west China. The multidisciplinary approach used at Sanxingdui has enriched the theory and methodology of field archaeology and sets a precedent for future scientific excavations.

Longbohe is a newly discovered copper mining, smelting and production site located strategically beside the Red River on the China–Vietnam border in Southeast Yunnan, China. Recent excavations have dated it from the second half of the second millennium to the end of the first millennium BC, making it the earliest copper mining and processing site in Upland Southwest China and Southeast Asia. The metallurgical production tradition in Upland Southwest China and Southeast Asia is recognized and detailed with reference to the chaîne opératoire revealed at the Longbohe site. The location of Longbohe provides evidence for a route along which metallurgy was introduced from Southwest China into Southeast Asia. Current evidence further suggests that metallurgy probably arrived on the Yunnan–Guizhou Plateau along the eastern Qinghai–Tibet Plateau corridors, and then entered Southeast Asia along south-flowing rivers. The Longbohe site is thus a most significant find in the southward dissemination of metallurgical technological systems into Southwest China and Southeast Asia in the later second millennium BC.

abstract: This article offers a novel interpretation of material remains to differentiate transcendent from non-transcendent rituals at Sanxingdui, a Bronze Age archaeological site in southwest China. This study establishes a five-element framework of ritual components (i.e., recipients, performers, assistants, offerings, and furnishings) and highlights the representations of ritual recipients, assistants, and furnishings as key differentiators of interworld communication in ritual contexts. By analyzing bronze artifacts from the Sanxingdui ritual pits that have been discovered and published so far, the research identifies two distinct artifact assemblages and their roles in ritual practices, categorizing them into transcendent and non-transcendent forms. The differing levels of investment in these ritual types provide insight into the emphasis on ritual at Sanxingdui.

Bronze Age wetland/scapes: Complex political formations in the humid subtropics of southwest China, 900–100 BC

The origin, development and expansion of prehistoric agriculture in East Asia have been widely investigated over the past two decades using archaeobotanical analysis from excavated Neolithic and Bronze Age sites. Research on prehistoric agriculture has predominantly focused in the valleys of the Yellow River and the Yangtze River. Agricultural development during the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods in the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau of southwest China, an important passageway for human migration into Southeast Asia, still remains unclear. In this paper, based on macrofossil and microfossil analysis and radiocarbon dating at the Shilinggang site, we investigate plant subsistence strategies in the Nujiang River valley during the Bronze Age period. Combined with previous archaeobotanical studies in the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, we explore agricultural development processes in this area during the Neolithic and Bronze Age. Our results indicate that rice and foxtail millet were cultivated in Shilinggang around 2500 cal a BP. Three phases of prehistoric agricultural development in the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau can be identified: rice cultivation from 4800–3900 cal a BP, mixed rice and millet crop (foxtail millet and broomcorn millet) cultivation from 3900–3400 cal a BP, and mixed rice, millet crop and wheat cultivation from 3400–2300 cal a BP. The development of agriculture in the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau during the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods was primarily promoted by prehistoric agriculture expansion across Eurasia, agricultural expansion which was also affected by the topographic and hydrological characteristics of the area.

The origins of agriculture have been a focal point of interest in Southeast Asia because of the profound influence domestication of cereal crops had on the ancient inhabitants of the region. Historically, an emphasis has been placed on the movement of farmers from China into Southeast Asia during the Neolithic, however, the origin of agriculture in Myanmar remains unknown. Recently, stable carbon and oxygen isotope analyses have provided insight into the subsistence practices of two prehistoric communities, Oakaie 1 and Nyaung’gan, living in north-central Myanmar during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, ca. 1300 − 700 BCE, but lacked the temporal resolution to identify any changes in the intensification of agriculture. Here, we report new C and O stable isotope analysis of individuals from Oakaie 1, and the UNESCO World Heritage complex of Halin excavated between 2017 and 2020. With a longer chronological sequence —dating between ca. 2700 BCE and 1300 CE— Halin provides the opportunity to examine diachronic changes in these practices. The results suggest individuals from Myanmar had a mixed subsistence economy focused on C3/C4 resources during the late Neolithic to Bronze Age and a less variable subsistence focused on C3 resources in the Iron Age, possibly associated with the intensification of wet rice agriculture and changes in water management practices. Situated in north-central Myanmar on the edge of mainland Southeast Asia, we suggest that southwest China, with a subsistence economy of rice and millet, played a role in the movement of this mixed farming strategy into Myanmar.

Carnelian beads in high-status burials of the Western Zhou period (ca. 1000-800 BCE) have long been seen as key evidence for long-distance exchange between East Asia and regions to the west, while their geological origins and circulation pathways have remained poorly constrained. Using a newly established geochemical database of 300 geological samples from 27 potential sources across Asia, we conducted trace-element analyses of 11 carnelian beads from the Sanxingdui pits (ca. 1200-1000 BCE), Sichuan Basin, southwest China. Canonical discriminant analysis indicates that the raw materials of these carnelian beads do not primarily derive from south China, but the Yanshan Orogeny, Central Asian Orogenic Belt and some unknown sources that might be close to Hexi Corridor, pointing to raw-material sources located over 1,000 km to the north of the Sichuan Basin. Comparative analyses of contemporaneous beads from Gansu, Shaanxi, and Beijing show similar northern provenance signatures, suggesting a broad and persistent exchange sphere spanning the southern Mongolian Plateau, Loess Plateau, eastern Tibetan Plateau, Central Plains, and Sichuan Basin between 1500-1000 BCE. Our results provide the earliest direct geochemical evidence for long-distance carnelian exchange in Bronze Age China and demonstrate the value of integrating geochemical sourcing with archaeological context to reconstruct ancient interaction networks.

The excavations of Bronze Age sites in the Central Lake region of Yunnan have resulted in a wealth of burial goods, including bronze kettledrums and cowrie vessels from the Shizhaishan necropolis near Lake Dian. Multidisciplinary analyses of these materials point to the existence of hierarchical societies of the Dian culture that flourished during the first millennium BC; the communities were ruled by an “aristocratic” elite who maintained contact with cultural groups in surrounding regions as well as far-flung areas. Recent archaeological investigations around Lake Dian also revealed occupation sites in association with the Bronze Age cemeteries in the same area. These new sites delineate a complex settlement system composed of nucleated groups with varied degrees of social complexity; among them the largest cluster near Shizhaishan appeared to have represented the heartland of Dian domain. Stratigraphic studies indicate that these settlements stemmed from a local Neolithic base that had existed in the Dian basin and low-lying areas further south, and that the Dian culture emerged independently from direct cultural/technological impacts from the Chinese central plains.