Overview

Although long considered to be a barren region on the periphery of ancient Chinese civilization, the southwest massif was once the political heartland of numerous Bronze Age polities. Their distinctive material tradition--intricately cast bronze kettle drums and cowrie shell containers--has given archaeologists and historians a glimpse of the extraordinary wealth, artistry, and power exercised by highland leaders over the course of the first millennium BC. In the first century BC, Han imperial conquest reduced local power and began a process of cultural assimilation.Instead of a clash between center and periphery or barbarism and civilization, this book examines the classic study of imperial rule as a confrontation between different political temporalities. The author provides an archaeological account of the southwest where Bronze Age landscape formations and funerary traditions bring to light a history of competing warrior cultures and kingly genealogies. In particular, the book illustrates how mourners used funerals and cemetery mounds to transmit social biographies and tribal affiliations across successive generations. Han incorporation thus entangled the orders of state time with the generational cycles of local factions, foregrounding the role of time in the production of power relations in imperial frontiers. The book extends approaches to empires to show how prehistoric time frames continue to shape the futures of frontier subjects despite imperial efforts to unify space and histories.

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9780199367344

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.. .a groundbreaking work in disentangling the complex history that is often clouded by a center-dominated narrative. It is a crucial theoretical contribution to the field...Her innovative anthropological approach...will contribute to revolutionizing our understanding of transmitted texts (e.g., bronze inscriptions) as the study of them often is often constrained by the text and its immediate archaeological contexts. It will also be valuable in the research of Bronze Age cultures and interactions in the central and marginal areas across China...There is thus no doubt that themethodologies and theories will be extremely influential to related fields. Beyond this, this book is also a great effort echoing James Scott's (2011) research on the peripheral societies and their significant role in the making of history. --Yijie Zhuang, <em>American Anthropologist</em> In a theoretically nuanced book, Alice Yao provides a rich empirical study of Southwest China during the period of Han imperialism. Her approaches to historicity, frontier, temporality, and periphery contribute new ideas to archaeological literature on identity and memory, and in the process undermine conventional views of indirect Han rule on the margins of empire. --Rowan K. Flad, Harvard University This archaeological history of Han China's southern frontier explores local elites' confrontation with the state's imperial reach through time. In synthesizing textual and archaeological materials from Southwest China, Yao's mortuary and landscape study offers valuable insights for comparative studies of agents who alternately created, sustained, and resisted ancient empires. --Miriam T. Stark, University of Hawai'i, Manoa

In a theoretically nuanced book, Alice Yao provides a rich empirical study of Southwest China during the period of Han imperialism. Her approaches to historicity, frontier, temporality, and periphery contribute new ideas to archaeological literature on identity and memory, and in the process undermine conventional views of indirect Han rule on the margins of empire. --Rowan K. Flad, Harvard University This archaeological history of Han China's southern frontier explores local elites' confrontation with the state's imperial reach through time. In synthesizing textual and archaeological materials from Southwest China, Yao's mortuary and landscape study offers valuable insights for comparative studies of agents who alternately created, sustained, and resisted ancient empires. --Miriam T. Stark, University of Hawai'i, Manoa

Yao's book is eloquently written and well produced, furnishing a variety of maps, photographs and drawings of sites and artefacts. * Nam C. Kim, Antiquity *

Author Information

Alice Yao is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

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