The landscape and regional integration of the Guan River Valley in the Eastern Zhou Period (770-221 B.C)

Summary

The regional full-coverage survey at the Guan River Valley reveals a highly integrated, hierarchical and structured settlement system in the first millennium B.C. This settlement system centered on a walled city on the broad alluvial plain of the middle stream. However, a supra-settlement, which was more than twice as large as the city, located at the mountainous area more than 25 km to the upper stream. The nature of this supra-settlement and its relation to the middle stream settlement system is difficult to interpret. Neutron activation analysis (NNA) shows that the chemical signature of ceramics, which includes both domestic pottery and architectural material, are similar between settlements in the upper and middle stream. This suggests that despite the landscape obstruction and occupation vacuum between the upper and middle stream, regional economic network, as manifested by the production and distribution of ceramics, connected these two areas closely. The regional settlement pattern and historic background implies that this regional integration was caused by reorganization of political and economic landscape of macro-region.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Staying Out of Small, Square Holes: The Contributions of Stephen Kowalewski to the Understanding of Human Societies at Regional and Global Scales

Keywords

Spatial Coverage