East/Southeast Asia (Geographic Keyword)
476-499 (499 Records)
Word Count =147. 200 maximum. Jiahu is one of the most important settlement sites of the Chinese Middle Neolithic Age (ca.7000-5500 BC) and is located in the upper Huai River Valley, China. During excavations, a number of ground stone tools were uncovered. Use-wear analysis and replication experiments were conducted in order to understand the functionality, usage and contact materials of these tools. Our experiments involved stone shovels, axes, adzes, gouges and other common stone tools from...
Use-wear analysis of the stone tools at the Wansan site, a Neolithic site in Taiwan (2015)
This is a multi-stage project intending to extrapolate the possible usages of various stone tools excavated from the Neolithic Wansan site in Northern Taiwan. In this poster, I want to demonstrate the preliminary results of the first stage that tries to identify possible patterns of tool use-wear. There are abundant finely ground lithic tools uncovered from the Wansan site. Previous research categorized these tools based on their morphology, and classified these tools as projectile points,...
Use-Wear Analysis on Cooking Vessels of the Longshan Culture: Case Studies on the Tonglin Site (2017)
Some preliminary research on ceramic vessels of the Longshan culture had indicated li vessels as the most important type of cooking vessels. Vessel's categories might not exclusively indicate a vessel type. As was observed for the Tonglin site, an important site of Longshan culture at Linzi, li, guan, and pen vessels are the most abundant categories type. However, li vessels of Tonglin site have small rim diameter sizes on average, and it is necessary to collaborating use-wear analysis for...
Use-wear Analysis on Quartzite Artifacts Using Replication Studies and A Comprehensive Application of High and Low Power Methods (2015)
In this paper, I report on the use-wear analysis of quartzite artifacts. This is one of the first systematic examinations in China for raw materials other than chert and obsidian. The experiments demonstrated that different use-wear patterns were observed on the different raw materials when the contact materials, use-motion and experimenters were the same. So our research supports the idea that there is no single solution for use-wear analysis. The different characteristics of use-wear...
Use-wear Analysis on the Stone Tools from the Dongshancun Site (2015)
he Dongshancun Site is located in Zhangjiagang city in Jiangsu Province in the eastern area of China. The site is only 2 kilometers from the Yangtze River. During 2008-2010, the Nanjing Museum excavated about 37 tombs belonging to the Songze Culture (3900-3100BC). Excavations revealed that some of interred were buried with abundant pottery vessels, jade artifacts, and other well-made stone tools such as the stone yue axe, stone adze and stone chisel. In this paper, we employ a low-power method...
Use-wear and Standardization Analysis of Pottery from Dibaping, A Banshan Period Cemetery in Southern Gansu Province, China (2017)
Excavated in 1978, the cemetery at the site of Dibaping in southern Gansu Province, China revealed hundreds of Banshan period (2600-2300BC) ceramic vessels. The elaborately painted geometric motifs on many of the vessels led to them quickly being touted as an example of the pinnacle of artistic achievement in Neolithic northwestern China. Aside from typology, however, no other analyses have been done on these objects. The result is that little is known about how these vessels were created, the...
Using Adaptive Capacity to Assess the Water Management System of Koh Ker, Cambodia (2016)
Further research to understand what makes agricultural and water management systems resilient is critical for the continued existence and growth of sustainable communities today, especially in urban contexts. Resiliency is a very useful concept for understanding how complex systems, but can be difficult to operationalize. In this paper, we argue that adaptive capacity can be used as a middle-range theory that allows archaeologists to engage in interdisciplinary discourses of system-level...
Using Organic Compound-Specific Stable Isotope Ratios to Identify Animals in Prehistoric Foodways of Southeast Asia (2016)
Recent advances in isotopic analysis have enabled archaeologists to move beyond subsistence and diet toward the full chaîne opératoire of foodways that includes inference of past culinary practices. Together with faunal identification, isotopic analysis of organic residues derived from ancient pottery helps to create linkages between material culture (i.e., pottery) and how animals were prepared and consumed, which, in turn, may be used to infer aspects of identity. Isotopic databases of modern...
Variation in Large Sites from the Longshan Period of Northern China (2017)
Recent research does not support the common view that the numerous large sites from the Longshan period of northern China ca. 2500-1900 BC represent a homogeneous type of settlement with respect to developmental process, scale, and organization. Most publications regard these large settlements as cities and expect they share specific features indicative of organizational homogeneity. The focus has been on large Longshan and later, early Bronze Age settlements in Henan province. We discuss...
A Vertical Loess Cave Dwelling at Yangguanzhai? (2017)
Of all features excavated at the late Neolithic site of Yangguanzhai since 2005—including houses, hearths, postholes, kilns, child and adult burials, and ditches—pits features, known by the generic term "huikeng" or "ash pit" in Chinese archaeology, account for about 80%. Detailed studies of such features are important not only because of their sheer number, but also because their contents are often used as criteria for site dating and chronology. As our excavation of one such feature (H85)...
Wars and battles as cultural phenomena in Bronze and Early Iron Age of Japan (2015)
Several lines of archaeological evidence indicate that numerous battles took place during the Yayoi Period or Japanese Bronze and Early Iron Age. So far, Japanese archaeologists have argued that these battles occurred as results of competition for agricultural lands or taking initiatives over exchange system. Many of the Japanese archeologists have speculated that wars were a part of the social process for evolving toward an early state society. However, archaeological evidence for wars, such...
Water, Weather and the Fallacy of the Rationalist - Romanticism dichotomy (2016)
Angkor, in Cambodia, between the 7th and the 13th century depended on the largest urban water management infrastructure of the agrarian urban world. The key elements of this infrastructure came into being before the global climate transition of the 9th-10th century CE. That infrastructure was vital for coping with the start of the Medieval Warm Phase when other societies around the world experienced severe crises. By the 14th century, some parts of Angkor’s infrastructure were nearly 500 years...
The Way the Wind Blows on the Steppe: The Historical Ecology of Mortuary Monuments in Mongolia (1500 BC-1400 AD) (2016)
Subject to continuous change, landscapes represent palimpsests of successive alterations over time. As such, landscapes have history. Following Carole Crumley’s major contributions to historical ecology, this paper charts diachronic change in mortuary landscapes in Mongolia against the backdrop of three major nomadic polities: the Xiongnu (200 BC-200 AD), The Turk Empire (550-850 AD), and the Mongol Empire (1200-1400 AD). The construction of impressive funerary stone monuments has been a...
Weathering the Tropics: The Problem of Archaeological Data Collection and Understanding Settlement Systems, Socio-Ecological Dynamics, Human-Thing Entanglements, and the Resiliency of Tropical Societies (2017)
The settlement sub-project of the Socio-Ecological Entanglement in Tropical Societies (SETS) investigations was executed by engaging a variety of data collection methods in order to assess the development and overall organization of settlements of support populations in a sample of pre-industrial tropical societies from South and Southeast Asia, and Mesoamerica. This presentation explores the diverse types, character, and quality of the data employed in the study, and underscores how, when...
What was Erlitou? Social Transformations from the Longshan Period to the Erlitou Period in a Network Perspective (2015)
This article detaches Erlitou from the paradigm of "state formation", and argues for an alternative approach: investigating the continuities and shifts in the multiple networks of politics, ideologies, and economics from the Longshan period to the Erlitou period. The development of political networks featured massive population relocations into the Luoyang basin to stabilize the new social order in the Erlitou polity. Transformed political and ethnographic patterns went hand in hand with changes...
What you see is what you believe: Mortuary Ideology and transmutations in Funerary Practice at the advent of the Xiongnu Empire in Mongolia. (2015)
This paper examines the intersection of mortuary ritual and beliefs, at the edge between funerary ideology and religion. The formation of the Xiongnu polity in the 3rd century BCE in what today is Mongolia included the introduction of new funerary regimes that conspicuously upended previous mortuary traditions. Xiongnu mortuary practice breaks a millennium-long convention of east-west orientation of funerary monuments and accompanying inhumations, the creation of visibly prominent and highly...
Where is the evidence for selection? (2016)
Few dispute that the Tibetan Plateau represents one of the harshest environments on the planet. It is reasonable to expect that human colonization of the Plateau entailed exposure to strong selective pressures. Successful colonization of the Plateau therefore implies the development of adaptations in response to these selective pressures. Genetic, physiological and morphological data from Plateau populations are consistent with a general model for biological adaptation under strong selective...
Where we sleep: Ethnoarchaeological perspectives on the Near Eastern Neolithic House and Households (2015)
How many people lived in individual buildings within early food producing communities? Be it as an explicit driver or as an implicit background landscape, all modeling of small-scale household life, developing Neolithic villages, and the evolutionary trajectory towards the full-blown domestication is linked on some level to demography and the increasing scale of human communities through time. The reconstruction of the scale of Neolithic house, including our engagement with what may represent...
Who made the China’s Terracotta Warriors and how? --- spatial interpretation on marking evidence (2016)
A striking feature of Qin material culture (770-210 BC) in ancient China is the frequency with which it preserves stamped, incised or painted marks with a variety of Chinese characters, numerals or symbols. In a general sense, such repeated mark-making was an administrative strategy that enabled Qin administrators to mobilise people, raw materials and finished goods in vast bulk, subject to careful quality and quantity control, and archaeologically, this strategy is nowhere more obvious than in...
Who were the urban Liao? - The cultural salience of ‘urban’ life in a mobile society (2017)
Recent insights into how urbanism and permanent settlements can function and be integrated into mobile societies has helped to overturn the notion that human societies ‘progress’ from mobile forms of production through irrigated agriculture to urbanism. Indeed the Liao Empire (907-1125CE) of Northeast Asia shows how these three modalities can coexist and be interdependent. City and kiln sites, standing architecture and tombs are distributed extensively through the former Liao territory, and yet...
Wide-Range Regional Interaction prior to State Formation in Late Prehistoric Eastern Japan (2015)
In Japan, pottery of various regions was transported for long distances in different directions at the same time and was incorporated into local pottery assemblages from the late second to third centuries A.D. This happened prior to the appearance of the highly-standardized keyhole-shaped burial mounds all over Japan and, in western Japan, local adoption of the type of pottery typical of the Kinki region where the central polity emerged. In eastern Japan, the type of pottery under the influence...
You go first. An agent-based model of mating-migration between early farming and foraging societies (2015)
Following the introduction of agriculture, domestication and permanent settlement in the early Holocene, patrilinear and patrilocal models have become more common than matrilineal and matrilocal ones. While patrilocality is observed at the worldwide level, matrilocality has been associated to specific areas, e.g. sub-Saharan Africa. Matrilocal and patrilocal residence patterns indicate whether as a rule, a newly formed couple settles with or near the female’s or male’s parents respectively. In...
Zones of Refuge: Resisting Conquest in the Northern Philippine Highlands through Agricultural Practice (2017)
The origins of the extensive wet-rice terrace complex in Ifugao, Philippines have been recently dated to ca. 400 years ago. Previously thought to be at least 2,000 years old, the recent findings of the Ifugao Archaeological Project show that landscape modification for terraced wet-rice cultivation started at ca. 1600. The archaeological record implies that economic intensification and political consolidation occurred in Ifugao soon after the appearance of the Spanish empire in the northern...
Zooarchaeological and Genetic Evidence for the Origins of Domestic Cattle in Ancient China (2017)
This paper reviews current evidence for the origins of domestic cattle in China. We describe two possible scenarios: 1) domestic cattle were domesticated indigenously in East Asia from the wild aurochs (Bos primigenius), and 2) domestic cattle were domesticated elsewhere and then introduced to China. We conclude that the current zooarchaeological and genetic evidence does not support indigenous domestication within China, although it is possible that people experimented with managing wild...