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The Ancient Highlands of Southwest China - From the Bronze Age to the Han Empire (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,291
Discovery Miles 22 910
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The Ancient Highlands of Southwest China - From the Bronze Age to the Han Empire (Hardcover)
Series: Oxford Studies in the Archaeology of Ancient States
Expected to ship within 12 - 19 working days
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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.
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