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Zusatztext Yao's book is eloquently written and well produced, furnishing a variety of maps, photographs and drawings of sites and artefacts. Informationen zum Autor Alice Yao is Assistant Professor in the Departmentof Anthropology, University of Chicago. Klappentext The Ancient Highlands of Southwest China offers a vivid account of the history of warrior polities occupying the southwestern frontiers of early China. Placing the archaeology of the "Dian" and its Bronze Age neighbors in dialogue with anthropological theory, Alice Yao shows how local histories of kingship come to challenge and resist imperial governance as well as the production of historiography. Zusammenfassung 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 kingdoms. Their distinctive material tradition--intricately cast bronze kettle drums and cowrie shell containers--have given archaeologists and historians a glimpse of the extraordinary wealth, artistry, and power exercised by highland leaders in prehistory. After a millennium of rule however, imperial conquest under the Han state reduced local power, leading to the disappearance of Bronze Age traditions and a fraught process of assimilation. Instead of a clash between center and periphery or barbarism and civilization, The Ancient Highlands of Southwest China examines the classic study of imperial conquest as a confrontation of different political times. Alice Yao grounds an archaeological account of the region where local landscape histories and funerary traditions bring to light a history of competing elite lineages, warrior cultures, and of kingly genealogies. In particular, this book illustrates how buried precious material objects--drums, ornate weaponry, and cowries--enabled the transmission and memorialization of biographies and lineage wealth across successive generations. A provocative picture emerges of imperial absorption and change as a problem entangling the generational time of highland leadership and its political cycles and the penetration of Chinese dynastic history as well as time of bureaucracy and state economy. Yao extends conventional approaches to empires to show how prehistoric forms of temporal experience can complicate imperial efforts to incorporate and unify time. Inhaltsverzeichnis Introduction The Han and the Southern Reaches Part I De-centering a Historicity of the Periphery Chapter 1 History Regained in Prehistory Chapter 2 Death and Funerary Ritual: Where Multiple Time Frames Converge Part II Bronze Age Histories Chapter 3 Time and Place in the Early Bronze Age Chapter 4 Bronze Kettledrums: Emergence of an Iconic Regional Tradition Chapter 5 A Southwest Political Time Part III Native Subjects and Han Rule Chapter 6 A Divided and Entangled Imperial Frontier Chapter 7 The D(eb)atability of the Past Concluding Remarks on Historiography of Frontiers Bibliography Index ...
