Where It Goes? Social Complexity and Political Economy in the Middle Bronze Age, Central-western Korea

Abstract

The processes and mechanisms of change in prehistoric social organizations are explored in archaeology. At the heart of the exploration are studies on the emergence of a regional-level complex social organization and political economy. The transition from the Early to Middle Bronze Age in centralwestern Korea witnessed social complexity and the utilization of intensive riceagricultural technology known as wet-rice farming. These two socioeconomic phenomena seem to have led to the first formation of a regional-scale political economy in Korean prehistory. I reconstruct a Middle Bronze Age sociopolitical organization based on regional settlement pattern data and suggest and compare two regional polities, each of which had a three-tiered settlement hierarchy and a substantial concentration of population in their centers within the research area of centralwestern Korea. Although these two polities mark an organizational similarity and geographical proximity, they show dissimilarity in their patterns of production and distribution of wet-rice. This difference is attributable to differing politico-economic interests of the elite who resided at the centers of the polities. That is, the elite of each polity had different strategies (one for tribute collection, the other for the direct management of agricultural production), but the same goal (funding their newly arising sociopolitical institutions) for sustaining the systems of political economy.