Prehistoric Societies on the Northern Frontiers of China

Archaeological Perspectives on Identity Formation and Economic Change During the First Millennium BCE

Gideon Shelach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781134944880
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

The northern borders of China - known as the Northern zone - were a key area of interaction between sedentary and nomadic people during the late second and early first millennium BCE. During this period the region's unique economy, socio-political systems, local cultures and identities took shape. 'Prehistoric Societies on the Northern Frontiers of China' analyses the archaeological record to examine the changes that took place in Northern China in the first millennium. Drawing on field work in the Chifeng area of Inner Mongolia, the book explores dramatic changes in the construction of identities alongside more gradual changes in subsistence strategies and political organization. The book is unique in integrating the archaeological data and historical records of this period with anthropological theory to examine the role of identity construction and the use of symbol in the shaping of East Asian society.

1 Introduction

This book focuses on the formative period of pastoral-sedentary relations, the late second and early first millennium BCE, on today’s northern borders of China. This area—known as the Northern Zone—emerged as a crucial arena for interactions among sedentary, semi-sedentary, and nomadic people during a decisive period in which the region’s unique economic adaptations, socio-political systems, local cultures and identities took shape. It is also during this period that the real and symbolic chasm between the ‘Chinese’ (or Zhou) states and their northern neighbors emerged, and when conscious attempts were made to define a broader, ethnic-like identity vis-à-vis the ‘other’ way of life.

Uncovering the complexity of multidimensional processes that operated during the late second and early first millennium BCE and shaped the economic, political and cultural makeup of East Asia is of unique historical value. It also provides an intriguing case study through which it would be possible to address theoretical and methodological issues relevant to archaeologists and anthropologists working in many parts of the world: what are the motivations (political, economic, social) responsible for the development of new economic adaptations? What are the effects of regional and inter-regional interactions on processes at the local level and how are such interactions used and manipulated by local actors? How, and for what purpose are identities constructed? And finally, how are such identities materialized through clothing and ornaments, rituals, intentional selection of foods and affiliation with external cultures?

These and other related questions have theoretical ramifications with which archaeologists and anthropologists are struggling (e.g. Bruck 2004; De Marrais, Castillo and Earle 1996; Emberling 1997; Feinman and Nicholas 1992; Fisher and DiPaolo-Loren 2003; Meskell 2001; Sherratt 1995; Wells 1998), as well as methodological implications: how can we address such issues through the analysis of archaeological data and in the absence (or scarcity) of written evidence? I believe that addressing such fundamental theoretical and methodological issues cannot be done in the abstract, it must be anchored in specific archaeological data of actual changes which took place in the economic and political structures and evidence for intersocietal interactions.

This work aims to do just that: develop novel theoretical and methodological approaches by analyzing concrete data sets and research questions. In this book I analyze concrete archaeological data, some of which was retrieved by research specifically designed to obtain types of data never before available from this region—while framing the analysis within broader social and historical contexts. I combine results from the ground-breaking archaeological research my colleagues and I conducted over the last ten years in border regions of north China (Shelach 1998; Shelach 1999; Linduff, Drennan and Shelach 2004), with insights concerning processes of interaction and the development of local and regional identities which I have developed (Shelach 2005). This book presents, for the first time, a coherent and multifaceted view on economic, political, and cultural changes which affected not only the societies which lived on the northern borders of China, but also the geopolitical system of a much larger region. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the archaeology of the Northern Zone—an area that stretches from what was traditionally known as Manchuria (the modern provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning) in the east, through Inner Mongolia to Gansu in the west—and outlines the social, political and economic trajectories of societies in this area and the construction of the broader geo-political East Asian system.

Making full use of the archaeological data, analyzed by a variety of methods (e.g. GIS [Geographical Information System], statistic, visual and spatial analysis) and viewed from different perspectives, this book argues that the transition to a pastoral-based economy was a relatively gradual one in the Northern Zone rather then the abrupt change that has been suggested by the traditional models. Moreover, although economic and political changes were important, at least during the initial stages, ideological motivations and especially the formation of local identities, were probably the most significant agents of change. These identities were created within the context of interregional interactions. Symbols borrowed through interactions with societies of the Eurasian steppes to the west, were used in the Northern Zone context to delineate local identities but also, more importantly, to create a common cohesive regional identity consciously different from the identity of the ‘Chinese’ societies to the south.

The theoretical and methodological issues discussed above are integrated within this framework and are applied to the understanding of concrete research questions. Comparison with archaeological and ethnographic research done in other parts of the world (e.g. Bruck 2004; Eicher 1995; Feinman and Nicholas 1992; Fisher and DiPaolo-Loren 2003; Hansen 2004; Wells 1998) is used as an analogy to better understand the local processes, but also to make the discussion more relevant to scholars and students working in regions outside of East Asia.

The Seeds of the New Order: How East Asia Changed during the Period between 1100–600 BCE

The dichotomy between ‘the steppe and the sown’ is one of the most powerful metaphors to have shaped the history of East Asia for over 2,500 years. Images of sedentary agricultural communities and pastoral nomadic lifestyles which were frequently referred to in oral and written histories, as well as the art which originated from the region, all contributed to the creation, shaping and strengthening of local identity. While some perceive the Great Wall of China as the most renowned expression of this dichotomy, the roots of the division predates even the first construction of long walls in this region. Moreover, the real and symbolic chasm between these two modalities persisted even in periods when no artificial boundaries existed between the two societies.

Although the metaphor of the Great Wall is one of stability, this book is about change: the changes that took place in East Asia during the first millennium BCE and shaped its geopolitical make-up for the next two and a half millennia.

The changes that took place in China during this era are well known and documented (cf. Falkenhausen 1999; Hsu 1999; Hsu and Linduff 1988; Pines 2002). However, much less is known about the contemporaneous changes, which took place in the steppe and semi-steppe regions north and west of China. Changes at the regional level and changes in interregional interaction patterns have rarely been studied and are not well understood. It is these two facets of change which the present book aims to focus on, in the hope of better understanding the complex archaeology and history of this region.

Over 60 years ago, the historical geographer Owen Lattimore (1940:21) coined the often-quoted dictum that ‘the general line of the Great Wall of China marks one of the most absolute frontiers in the history of the world’. Readers often fail to notice that only a few pages further in the same book, Lattimore (1940:25) qualifies this statement by adding human motivations and actions into his considerations and argues that the Great Wall was not so much an absolute frontier but rather ‘the product of social emphasis continuously applied along a line of cleavage between environments’. This lesson, relating to the importance of human agency was not always adhered to by Lattimore’s successors. Even today, the apparent association between environmental conditions, economic adaptation and types of socio-political organization entice scholars to think of the so-called ‘steppe and the sown’ as a stable dichotomy extending back to early prehistoric times. For example, according to Rhoads Murphey (1989:51), ‘the Great Wall of China was built, not primarily as a military barrier… But as a line of demarcation between the steppe and the sown, between the territory of the nomadic pastoralist and that of the imperial Chinese state’. Similarly, Askarov and his colleagues argue that ‘The stockbreeding herdsmen who inhabited Mongolia and other areas north of the Great Wall in the second millennium B.C. differed from the Chinese in their economy, their way of life and their original and distinctive art. Moreover, they constituted a distinct ethnic entity, to which they owed many of the specific features of their culture’ (Askarov et al. 1992:465).

More updated research challenges two of the fundamental perceptions of this classical model. First, it is argued that the economic and social structures of societies which inhabited the steppe area during prehistoric and historic periods were much more diverse than previously assumed and that some of these societies engaged in activities and organized themselves in ways that the traditional model had associated with the settled societies of China (Di Cosmo 1994; Honeychurch and Amartuvshin 2005; Shelach 2004; Frachetti 2004). Second, relations between the societies that inhabited the area known today as China and areas of the steppe were far from stable. Recent research has proved that throughout the history of the region interactions between agriculturalist and pastoralist societies were much more complex than the traditional model had lead us to believe. Rather than being static, these interactions changed and evolved over time and space, adapting themselves to political and socio-economical developments in the region (e.g. Barfield 1989; Di Cosmo 2002; Johnston 1995; Pan 1997; Rossabi 1983).

While it is true that the opposition between the agricultural-based bureaucratic states of China and the pastoral nomadic and tribal society of the steppe is often times over-simplified, it cannot be denied that during historical periods such an idealized dichotomy was an important conceptual framework that informed many of the interactions between societies in East Asia. However, this book shall argue that such a framework is a relatively recent phenomenon. The formation of the geopolitical system, which Lattimore described, only took place according to my analysis, during the first millennium BCE. This was a process that in many ways shaped and defined the history of East Asia for the next two millennia and well into the Modern Era.

But what were the forces that initiated and fashioned this fundamental transformation? In what follows I shall argue, based on archaeological data collected from areas in northern China and areas beyond it, that while economic and political changes were gradual, ideological changes—such as the formation of local identity—were more abrupt. Analyzing these changes, their regional context and their effects on the local, regional and interregional levels is the intention of this book.

A comparison of the geopolitical and social landscape of East Asia before and after the first millennium BCE indicates that the changes which took place appear to have been dramatic and meaningful. During the third and second millennium BCE, the area so defined, including present-day China and Korea, parts of Mongolia and the southeastern parts of Russia, was occupied by polities who had much in common in terms of their socio-political structures and economic systems. Certainly, however, these societies were not identical to each other. Most noticeable is that by the second millennium BCE several of the societies in the Yellow River basin and other parts of central China reached a greater level of social complexity, political stratification and economic diversification. Nevertheless, the societies that occupied East Asia during this period differed from each other more in scale than in kind. If it were possible to view the socio-political landscape during this period from a bird’s-eye view, we would no doubt observe that all polities, large or small, were based on extensive agriculture production, had incipient but not very rigid socio-political stratification and undiversified political systems (Underhill 1997). Furthermore, although the archaeological data suggests the existence of an interregional interaction network, there is no evidence to suggest that local identity vis-à-vis other societies had been developed by that time.

A very different image would be revealed by a socio-political bird’s-eye view of the final centuries of the first millennium BCE. By that time, the regions surrounding the Yellow and Yangzi River basins were occupied by stratified state-level societies ruled by paramount leaders and controlled through centralized and highly diversified bureaucratic systems. Economically, these states were based on intensive irrigation agriculture and specialized systems for the procurement of resources and production of goods (Bagley 1999; Chang 1980, 1986; Hsu and Linduff 1988; Keightley 1999; Liu and Chen 2003). Beyond the area controlled by the Chinese states, and later on by the Chinese empires, there existed societies which were much less diversified. Some of these societies, such as the Xiongnu of the third century BCE to the second century CE, controlled large territories and achieved a high level of political centralization (Barfield 1981; Di Cosmo 2002:206–52). However, all of these societies were internally much less stratified than their Chinese counterparts. Their economic system was diversified and less specialized, based mainly on herding and, whenever conditions permitted, was mixed with extensive agriculture (Di Cosmo 1994; Shelach 2005).

Furthermore, early Chinese documents suggest no clear alienation or dehumanization of the non-Chinese people; however, by the end of the first millennium BCE a clear symbolic dichotomy had been developed, where each society viewed the other as fundamentally and almost irreconcilably different (Pines 2005). This dichotomy between ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ or ‘the steppe and the sown’ formed a most powerful metaphor, which shaped the history of East Asia for at least 2,500 years. Within this context, even the Great Wall of China can be seen as a symbolic device that enhanced the differences between societies on both sides of it. However, these symbolic differences were not dependent on the construction of artificial or even political barriers. A symbolic chasm between these two modalities persisted even during periods when the borders were not clearly demarcated and even when both modalities existed within a single polity. Although, as pointed out above, the relationships between agricultural and pastoral societies or between China and her neighbors were less rigid and much more complex than the traditional model had lead us to believe, the long-term impact of the real and imagined dichotomy should not be underestimated. It may have been manipulated in different ways in accordance with the political and cultural context but it retained its political and metaphoric vigor throughout the history of the region.

A note is in order on the usage of the terms ‘China’ and ‘Chinese’ in this book: although I am fully aware that in the context of this book these terms are anachronistic, concepts that are comparable to what we may call ‘Chinese’ developed during the later part of the Zhou Era and were formalized only during the Imperial Era. Nonetheless, I find it impossible not to employ the use of such terms at all. I have tried, however, to employ these terms in as few places as possible and to limit myself to two types of usages: one is as geographical shorthand relating to the area currently inside the borders of the PRC (People’s Republic of China). A more meaningful, and perhaps controversial usage is in reference to the states of the Zhou area as ‘Chinese states’ and to their common culture as ‘Chinese culture’. Such usage is both convenient and purposeful. Although the population of these states did not perceive themselves as being ‘Chinese’, in hindsight calling them Chinese is justifiable because much of what we can call the Chinese culture of the early Imperial period—such as the written Chinese language, important texts, social and political norms, religious beliefs and artistic expressions—were already present and significant during the first half of the first millennium BCE (Loewe 1999).¹ Relating to these states as ‘Chinese’ indicates that they were intimately related to the development of the Chinese culture and opposes them with the non-Zhou people who were much more distant from it.

I employed above the comparison between the third millennium and the end of the first millennium BCE as a heuristic device in order to elucidate and perhaps dramatize the change, which took place between these two periods. However, focusing on extreme points in time trivializes the change and makes it seem inevitable. To understand the change that took place, we must focus more clearly on the process of the change and on the human motivations and actions which lead to this change. While recent studies on the later phases of the creation of the ‘steppe and the sown’ dichotomy and the interaction between China and its pastoralist neighbors are quite numerous (e.g. Barfield 1989; Di Cosmo 2002; Poo 2005), in-depth research of the formative stages of this process are still lacking. Even the general nature of the change during the period between ca. 1200–600 BCE is not agreed upon, let alone the details of this change, its causes and mechanisms.

This book is about change. But it is also about our ability to understand prehistoric changes that took place in the social, political, economic or cultural spheres. The core of this research addresses very simple and traditional questions: ‘What happened? When did it happen? Why did it happen?’ and the common set of questions relating to reasons and consequences, which have always been derived from these fundamental, time-honored questions. In this book, I seek to comprehend what happened in East Asia during the first half of the first millennium BCE: what kind of changes or continuations can we observe, what factors brought about these changes and how these changes shaped the history of the region. However, I am not so naïve as to believe that such questions could have straightforward, unambiguous answers. Therefore, my goal is not to reach ultimate answers to all the questions mentioned above, but to develop several working models and through a multi-dimensional analysis formulate a plausible hypothesis that integrates local and regional processes.

This book is an attempt to write history, in the broader social, economic and cultural sense of the term. This attempt encountered many obstacles which forced me to make methodological choices. While the period under discussion is not prehistoric in the strictest sense—some historical records from the Yellow River basin are available starting from about 1200 BCE—for the purpose of this book it should be viewed, I believe, as essentially prehistoric. From a methodological standpoint, this recognition lead me to focus on archaeological data and to only rarely employ the use of historical documents usually for illustration purposes rather than for analytical purposes. For far too long, the research on the early formation of the East Asian socio-political landscape and research on the interactions between societies of the Yellow and Yangzi River Basins and societies of the steppe and semi-steppe area has been heavily dependent on information collected from fragmented Chinese historical documents. Prominent among these are documents which were written during the second half of the first millennium BCE (such as descriptions scattered in the Zuozhuan), and even more well-known are the writings of the great Chinese historians of the late centuries BCE and first centuries CE, Sima Qian (ca. 145–90 BCE) and Ban Gu (32–92 CE) who lived at the dawn of the Imperial Era. While these are, without doubt, valuable primary historical sources (see, for example, an insightful analysis of these sources in Di Cosmo 2002 and in Pines 2005), these sources paint a distorted image when dealing with the early stages of the development of pastoral societies and their relationships with Chinese society. They often project the situation of their own time back onto events that took place centuries before they were written. These sources are also often saturated with Sinocentric ideology—itself a late phenomenon—which stereotypes the pastoralist people and disguises their motivations. Furthermore, the information these texts provide us with is partial at best. Like many ancient histories, most of the infor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Charting the Change: What Can We Learn from the Archaeological Record about Changes That Occurred between 1100–600 BCE
• 3 Is It the Economy? Economical and Political Processes in the Northern Zone
• 4 Symbols and Identity: The Drawing of Mental Boundaries
• 5 Local, Regional and Global: Interaction Spheres and Social Change
• 6 Conclusions: Archaeological Versus Historical Perspectives on Processes during the First Half of the First Millennium BCE and Beyond
• Appendices
• Appendix of Chinese names
• Bibliography
• Index