Setting the Stage

Our understanding of diachronic change in the landscape of Central China is structured by two underlying topographies: (1) the environmental context within which societies developed in the region and (2) the topography of archaeological historiography – the history and development of archaeological research in a region. These two topographies have changed over time – the former contemporaneously with the time periods on which this book focuses and the latter throughout the course of archaeological research in the region. In these two chapters, we examine these topographies and their trajectories of change.

Environmental topographies, discussed in Chapter 2, are defined by the physiographic conditions within which human societies were established and developed. The environmental conditions include the physical geography and the climatic conditions that influenced the means by which communities interacted, the natural resources to which people had access, and the extrasocial factors that sometimes played a major role in shaping human society. Physical geography helped define routes of communication and barriers to movement. Climate, hydrology, and other dynamic aspects of the environment all contributed to a varied landscape of risks and rewards that affected human behavior. Our understanding of these dynamic factors is imperfect, of course, because it depends on data that are as fragmentary as the archaeological record. Nevertheless, we are able to outline the environmental changes that would have affected communities in Central China during the period of focus in this book, and we are able to identify those aspects of the physical environment that would have made certain locations hospitable to settlement (such as availability of water and other natural resources) and those factors that would have made other locations less desirable (including swamplands, propensity for flooding, and difficulty in acquiring resources).

Preliminaries

We begin with a caveat. For many, “Central China” will appear to be misapplied to the region on which we focus in this book. The term may evoke the so-called Central Plains of the Yellow River valley in northern China, which are central to most discussions of Chinese civilization and central to the primary narratives of China's origins. The area discussed here, comprising the modern provinces of Hubei and Hunan, the Sichuan Basin, and the municipality of Chongqing, is peripheral to these stories and often referred to as “Southwest China.” But the southwest of the modern People's Republic of China (PRC) in fact includes the Tibet Autonomous Region, Yunnan, Guizhou, and the western mountainous parts of Sichuan not focused on here. Because archaeology speaks to the processes that set the foundations for modern nation-states, and because these nation-states play a considerable role in determining how archaeological and historical data are collected and considered, it is appropriate to use the PRC to identify our broader area of interest, and the Sichuan Basin, Chongqing, Hubei, and Hunan are actually just south of its geographical center. As this book makes clear, notions of centrality and peripherality need to be interrogated in our investigation of the ancient world, and our provocative use of Central China is intended to draw attention to this issue.

Over the course of this book, we have seen that areas that were peripheral to political topographies in Central China, such as the Three Gorges region, could nevertheless be important nodes in production and trade and were central locations in the process by which cultural identities were formed. In particular, the production and distribution of salt were responsible for bringing the people of the Three Gorges into increasing communication with communities farther away. The people who produced and traded salt in this area interacted with people in the Shu region to varying degrees and, as the burial data show, were part of a network of communities that was gradually penetrated by members of a Chu diaspora. By examining this region through the lens of multiple conceptual topographies, we gain a perspective that is lost when political peripheries are marginalized. This realization emerges through the process of bringing the political periphery of Central China to the fore.

As has been noted for other regions of the world, “peripheries situated between cores were far from helpless in dictating the terms of exchange” (Kohl 1987b: 20) or the nature of other forms of interaction with distant regions. This understanding has caused a shift in recent scholarship toward trying to understand the roles that political peripheries played in political change. Lyons and Papadopoulos (2002a: 7), for example, have noted that “scholars [have] turned from examining centers to peripheries, the marginal spaces where difference is negotiated and where actions and expectations take on new senses. The periphery, of course, is not an external geographical point but represents those borderland settings in which meanings are displaced and reinvented.” A focus on so-called far peripheries is, therefore, an essential part of any attempt to understand social change and regional relationships (see Hall 2000: 237).

Historical Accounts of Yong and Ba

In the last two chapters, we outlined the culture-history and archaeological data from the Chengdu Plain and the Middle Yangzi to provide a sketch of the political and cultural topographies of these regions from the Late Neolithic through the Bronze Age. Here we turn our attention to that in between – the Three Gorges – and adjacent regions along the Yangzi River and its tributaries.

Similar to the Sichuan Basin, the Three Gorges region is not well attested in historical documents for the time period under consideration here. Several ethnonyms appear in scattered historical texts and may refer to groups in the region. These terms may, to an extent, have been imposed on heterogeneous local cultures from the outside as part of a “schematic account of the past” (Bagley 1999: 230) that served to support a particular perspective on political order through the “geographical violence” that can be brought about by naming (Said 1994: 225). Colonizers have often considered differences among indigenous groups to be irrelevant (Dominguez 2002: 69). By using a single term or a small number of terms to refer to all the “others,” indigenous identities are eliminated (Lightfoot and Martinez 1995). We should be particularly cautious, therefore, when dealing with external textual sources that characterize ethnic groups in the past.

Introduction

The environment of Central China sets the physical stage for various social and cultural topographies that comprise the ancient landscape. As explained earlier, Central China refers to the Upper and Middle reaches of the Yangzi River (103°–116°E longitude and 27°–33°N latitude) and encompasses parts of the modern provinces of Sichuan, Hubei, Hunan, Guizhou, and Chongqing Municipality (see Figure 2.1). Altitudes in this region range from less than 50 meters above sea level (masl) in the plains of the Middle Yangzi to peaks of more than 3,000 masl west and northwest of the Chengdu Plain and at Shennong peak in the Wu Mountains north of the Three Gorges.

Central China is dominated by a main artery – the Yangzi River – and its tributaries. The Yangzi is known in Chinese as Changjiang, or “Long River,” a name that speaks to its tremendous length (approximately 6,380 km from its source in the Himalayas to its mouth near Shanghai). The Yangzi's separate sections each has its own local designation. “Yangzi” once only referred to the last approximately 300 km near the river mouth, but nineteenth-century Western experience with exclusively this region extended “Yangzi” to the entire river in modern parlance, and we will use it this way throughout this book. Over its length, the Yangzi and its tributaries drain an area of nearly 1,127,000 km2, currently populated by more than 350 million people (Shaw 2004; Van Slyke 1988).

Introduction

Here we turn our attention to the region's economic topography through a focus on the spatial arrangement of locations where resource extraction, production, and exchange took place. Among the nodes in such topographies are sources of plant and animal resources; mining sites or other source locations for raw materials; locations, such as workshops, where materials were transformed into finished products; and roads, other transportation networks, and markets or places for economic exchange.

Of course, the spatial distributions of household production and other aspects of domestic economic activity parallel residential settlement patterns. Furthermore, because the production and exchange of material culture (particularly ceramics) define the spatial extents of archaeological cultures, these aspects of the economic and cultural topographies are intimately related. Likewise, when economic production and exchange are important factors in the political control of a region by a ruling elite, economic and political topographies are closely tied to one another. Nevertheless, examining the geography of economic activity forces us to different starting points in our assessment of regional patterns of activity.

Burials and Burial Practice

Mortuary contexts provide some of the best archaeological data for establishing patterns of past social interaction. They offer a window into those aspects of individual and group identity that were most salient in the minds of the members of a community. How archaeologists should go about interpreting burial patterns has, consequently, been an important issue for decades. In studies of mortuary remains, the degree of burial elaboration has long been thought to be a relatively direct means of understanding social structure and stratification. This perspective was most forcefully advocated in the 1970s following the seminal work of Arthur Saxe (1970). Saxe's ethnographic work concluded that mortuary patterns reflect consciously selected social distinctions that were important to the associated living society. Direct interpretation of these patterns was subsequently developed by other processual archaeologists (Binford 1971; Brown 1981, 1995; Tainter 1978; O’Shea 1984) and remains an influential strain of burial archaeology.

Despite the optimism of this direct approach, scholars have long recognized that “the activities and statuses of the mourners” (Peebles 1971: 68) were more critical to the patterns observed in burial contexts than were the relationships among the deceased (Humphreys 1981; Metcalf and Huntington 1991; Ucko 1969). Archaeologists who wrestle with this aspect of burial patterns see death as a ritual process that must be understood in its cultural context and burials as one small, albeit important, aspect of elaborate ritual ceremonies (Flad 1998, 2002; Kuijt 1996; Morris 1987, 1992; Nilsson Stutz 2003, 2008; Pader 1982). Burial rituals are not only (or necessarily) occasions to reify existing social distinctions but may also be contexts in which living individuals assert identity in the face of broader social practices. “Mortuary ritual provides a setting in which individuals recreate, manipulate, negotiate, and use existing schemes of funeral practice for different ends” (Flad 2002: 30).

Political and Cultural Topographies

Chapter 3 explains the emphasis on culture-historical traditions as a principal factor shaping the topography of research in Central China. In the next several chapters (Chapters 4–6), we turn our attention to the substance of this culture-history to outline the centers and peripheries of political and cultural developments in the region. Our focus is the period from the middle third to late first millennia b.c. During this era, the Sichuan Basin and the Middle Yangzi separately (but not independently) saw the emergence of politically complex societies, while the Three Gorges remained a politically peripheral region. Although the timing, tempo, and scale of emerging complexity differed in the two regions, in both cases, the critical roles that polities played in local cultural developments are reflected in historical references and archaeological data. To evaluate the correspondence among cultural, political, and other topographies, we must first outline the basic geography of culture history.

The political and cultural topographies of Central China changed over time. Any single synthesis, however, necessarily must reduce a constantly changing situation to a dominant narrative. Here our narrative aims to identify centers of authority and control as well as features and sites that played important roles in political integration. These centers of influence are noted in historical documents as the political entities Shu and Chu, associated with the Sichuan Basin and the Middle Yangzi region, respectively.

Introduction

Archaeology is the systematic study of material remains to reconstruct patterns of past human activity and to understand why such patterns emerged. Archaeologists rely heavily on the contextual relationships among various aspects of the material record of the past. Context provides clues that are not inherent in material remains themselves but that nevertheless contain information about past human behavior. An explicitly archaeological approach to the past, involving a systematic focus on context, emerged in the nineteenth century, although its intellectual roots can be traced to much earlier times (Trigger 2006; Willey and Sabloff 1993).

The origins of archaeology as an academic discipline in different geographical regions vary considerably owing to the social contexts surrounding intellectual life and the ways in which ideas about the past have been made relevant to the present. A topography of archaeological historiography (the history and development of archaeological research in a region) highlights areas where research has been concentrated or ignored. In Chinese archaeology, Central China occasionally contained areas of intense archaeological focus, but, more frequently, it was overlooked as a region peripheral to historical narratives. Within Central China, areas that have received the most attention consequently provide the majority of available data. The historiographical topography of Central China therefore fundamentally affects the way we understand multifaceted landscapes in antiquity.

Topographies of Economic Activity and Ritual

Up to this point, we have focused on Central China as a whole by examining the environmental conditions that affected human activity in the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age, the history of research that has constrained our understanding of this region, and the general political and cultural topographies that can be outlined given this previous research. This summary provides a fair foundation for understanding historical change in this region, although, admittedly, there are many holes that will need to be filled by future research.

In the next three chapters, we explore additional aspects of the changing prehistoric landscape of Central China. In particular, we examine loci of economic and ritual activities and consider how they correspond with those with evidence of important political institutions and dense populations. We will see that areas with little evidence for developed political institutions nevertheless were places where important economic and ritual developments took place.

This observation is only made possible through a concerted effort to adopt what Rice (1998) has called a pericentric approach, in which politically peripheral regions are brought to the forefront of examination. By focusing on political peripheries, we examine the extent to which these places were actually crucial to the changing dynamics of societies and cultures across the larger region. In the coming chapters, our particular focus is the Three Gorges region.