Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Rice Agricultural Intensification and Sociopolitical Development in the Bronze, Central Western Korean Peninsula

University Of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

Under the supervision of Robert D. Drennan, Bumcheol Kim will carry out doctoral dissertation research in central western Korean on the transition from the Early Bronze Age (1300-800 B.C.) to the Middle Bronze Age (800-400 B.C.). This transition represents the initial appearance of social inequality and emergent chiefdoms in the region along with the intensification of rice production. By analyzing settlement data at various scales equivalent to different social components (e.g. regional polities, local communities, and individual households), Mr. Kim will reconstruct the relationship between agricultural production and emergent social complexity. His research will position the societies studied along a continuum ranging from complete household autonomy in subsistence affairs to direct management of agricultural systems by centralized authorities as a means of mobilizing surplus resources. His methodology will include primary regional settlement survey; incorporating data from previously conducted surveys into GIS analysis along with information on topography, hydrology, soils, and ancient transportation routes; and comparison of household artifact assemblages recovered in previously conducted excavations at sites in the regional survey area. The complex societies that developed independently in different parts of the world, including Korea, often relied on intensive agricultural technologies that required massive input of human labor but yielded very large returns per unit of land. Such patterns of production have often been the basis of social hierarchy since they can provide the means for elites to mobilize the labor of primary producer households toward the generation of the surplus necessary for funding sociopolitical institutions. The operation of such systems has most often been studied in highly developed forms, leaving the origins and initial development of such political economies poorly documented. Even studies of the "chiefdoms" that preceded fully developed states tend to concentrate on the more complex forms of chiefly organization rather than its initial stages. They also focus on what level of social complexity is required for organizing intensive agricultural systems, more than on how the relationship between social hierarchy and agricultural production worked. Although our knowledge of the ways in which such systems worked in the ancient Near East and in the New World tropics has grown substantially,. comparatively little attention has been paid to this issue for early East Asian complex societies, and Mr. Kim's research will help fill this gap in our knowledge. This dissertation project will have a broader impact on the infrastructure of archaeological science by providing the doctoral candidate with training in the design, direction, and realization of professional field research, by providing fundamental field experience to a number of graduate and undergraduate archaeology students who will assist in carrying out the project, and by building international collaborative partnerships among individual and institutional participants.