Toward a Reconstruction of Early Settlements in Metal Age Yunnan

Summary

Although research works on the Bronze Age burials in Yunnan in the past fifty years have expanded our knowledge on various aspects of ancient Yunnan societies, many questions pertaining to the earliest stages of human existence in Yunnan have remained to be answered for short of a well-defined chronological sequence from settlement archaeology. Recent findings of early habitation sites in the environs of the Lake Er are beginning to shed new lights on the exiting issues, including questions regarding the onset of metallurgy in Yunnan. Studied in conjunction with a newly established ceramic sequence, the typological, stratigraphic, metallographic, and phytolith analyses of materials taken from these sites can now be used to assist in characterizing the regional features of early Yunnan cultures, as well as in interpreting interactions occurring in and around western Yunnan during the 2nd millennium BCE. These studies appear to have dovetailed with the result from analyzing metal particles in sediment cores from Lake Er--a chronological table suggesting the transition between the Neolithic and Bronze Ages of Yunnan.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Recent Advances in the Settlement and Landscape Archaeology of (South)west China and Southeast Asia Part II: The Micro Perspective of Internal Settlement Organization and Object Production

Keywords

Spatial Coverage