Societies and environmental transformations in early modern Yunnan: A spatial analysis of written sources and oral histories

Summary

This paper uses geographic visualization to analyse possibilities and limitations of historical sources and fieldwork in studying changes in settlement patters and environmental change in Yunnan province. Local gazetteers are an important source on local conditions. It reflects the perspective of the administration on to some extent that of the Han-Chinese elite, and creates a written and rewritten local tradition. Mapping the zones of attention and the information provided in this type of source shows for which parts of a local administrative area information is dense and reliable, and which parts remain largely uncharted. Moreover, in combination with other information on landscape change, economic activities and migration, shreds of information in largely unrecorded transformations can be interpreted. Oral history faces limitations in depth of time. The localization of genealogical information and stories of family migration demonstrates that information through corroboration and falsification can be assessed and reasonably reliably used.

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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 Southwest China and Southeast Asia Part I: The Macro Perspective: Spatial Analysis and Subsistence Systems

Keywords

Spatial Coverage