Working for His Majesty? Reconstructing the Regional Pottery Networks of the First Walled Center of Liangzhu during the Third Millennium BCE in the Yangtze River Delta, China

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Black-skin pottery of the Neolithic Liangzhu Culture of the Yangzi River Delta, regarded as advanced craftsmanship for the third millennium BCE, is believed to have been centrally produced and/or distributed as a distinctive type of pottery, distinct from non-black-skin pottery. However, with no kilns discovered yet, this assertion is primarily based on its seemingly uniform style and the assumption that the center should oversee sophisticated crafting as later states did supposedly. Using black-skin pottery as a starting point, this paper aims to explore the possibility of alternative modes of Liangzhu’s political economy beyond a centralized economic system. Depending on variations in the composition and manufacturing technique of pottery revealed in ceramic analysis, modes of production and exchange networks, such as center-distribution, integrated network, or small-scale networks, can be examined by evaluating the similarities or differences in the proportion of pottery groups across assemblages. This inquiry seeks to answer critical questions: Was it indeed the case that the center controlled the production and circulation of black-skin pottery? Is black-skin pottery indeed evidence of an asymmetric economic relationship between those living within and outside the wall? Or could its distribution pattern actually serve as evidence for a multi-nodal, heterarchical economic network?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50404