Collaborative Research: Social and Economic Differentiation in Hongshan Core Zone Communities

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With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Christian E. Peterson, Robert D. Drennan, Lu Xueming, and an international team of colleagues will conduct three field seasons of archaeological survey and excavation in northeast China. They will investigate the societies of the Hongshan period (4500-3000 BC), which represent the earliest "chiefdoms" or complex societies in their part of the world. Monumental scale religious and burial structures in the Hongshan cultural core zone testify to dramatic social inequality and the presence of large labor forces. Multiple small regional polities are known for Hongshan times, but only in areas far from the Hongshan core zone. Direct evidence about the human communities that built and utilized the monuments of the core zone has never been collected. It is not at all clear, then, what these most developed Hongshan communities were like, or what social, political, economic, or ideological forces produced this development. Core zone communities may have been much larger than peripheral ones. They may have had highly developed craft specialization. There may have been wide gaps in standard of living between rich and poor families. Shamans or other kinds of religious figures may have been sharply set off from the rest of the population. Such characteristics have been speculated about, but in fact only ritual platforms and burials with elaborate jade carvings are known.This project will focus on three different tasks in the field in order to collect the information needed to describe Hongshan communities. First, a regional settlement survey of 150 km2 will be carried out around the core zone monumental site of Dongshanzui. The survey will document the regional distribution of habitation around this central place and provide an indication of the community's population and spatial extent. Second, intensive surface artifact collection within Hongshan settlement areas revealed by the regional survey will identify individual household locations and yield artifactual remains to assess differ-ences between them in terms of wealth, status, and economic activities. Third, stratigraphic test excava-tions will provide better chronological control and at least a glimpse of the features associated with varied household artifact assemblages.It is becoming ever clearer that early chiefdoms followed highly varied trajectories of development, and that comparisons between them can contribute to better understandings of this fundamental trans-formation in human societies. The information collected by this project will make it possible to place Hongshan societies alongside other chiefdoms for comparison.Beyond its intellectual contributions, the proposed research will have broader impacts as well. As a joint effort of the universities of Hawai'i and Pittsburgh and the Liaoning Province Institute of Archaeology, it will foster closer international scholarly collaboration. It will provide training and field experience for both Chinese and foreign archaeology students in methodologies not widely employed in China; and it will give foreign students first-hand exposure to archaeology in China. It will provide experience to local cultural patrimony workers in systematic archaeological survey, and the survey results will contribute to their efforts to inventory the cultural remains they seek to protect and preserve.