Early Complex Societies in North China: The Chifeng International Collaborative Archaeological Project

University Of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

With support from the National Science Foundation Dr. Katheryn M. Linduff and her colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh, Jilin University, Hebrew University and the Inner Mongolia Institute of Archaeology will conduct three more seasons of archaeological fieldwork in the Chifeng region of southeastern Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in northeastern China. The region is strategically positioned between the center of early Chinese dynasties in the agriculturally productive Yellow River basin and the steppe land to its north and west where a pastoral nomadic adaptation developed. The region shows a long sequence of relatively independent development before it was fully incorporated into the dynastic system. The team seeks to record and clarify what conditions led to greater social complexity in the region. The principal research activity is a regional-scale settlement study. The first two field seasons (1999-2000) have already begun to provide information on the period from c. 6000 B.C. through c. A.D. 200 that will be necessary to understand the relationships among sites already investigated through stratigraphic excavation during several decades of research by Chinese archaeologists. Work in the Chifeng region to date has covered 550 sq km of a projected 1350 sq km area and aims to broaden our knowledge beyond the subjects treated in ancient Chinese historical documents that saw the Central Plain as the primary location and motivator of change across north Asia. Second, it is focused on a region outside the heartland of early Chinese states, in which no historical documents were written, but where excavated mortuary materials suggest the existence of more complexity than reported in the texts. The research has begun to collect information necessary to contextualize existing archaeological data and bring it to bear on reconstructing social, political, cultural, and economic patterns for the whole region.The team will conduct further stratigraphic excavations in order to clarify the chronological sequence, conduct instrument mapping and intensive surface collection of surface remains of several sites with extensive above ground architectural remains so a to understand their functions better. Although China has long been recognized as vital to comparative study of the origins and development of complex society, data from there is absent even from most recent syntheses and is only recently been systematically collected in this way. Dr Linduff's project is the one of very few international collaborative archaeological endeavors in China and the first of its kind in the northern region. The resulting information will contribute to a broadened understanding of the variability to be observed in the trajectories of development of early complex societies in a global comparative context.