It sets the Pazyryk Culture into the landscape using recent studies on climate, technology, human and animal DNA, and local resources. It shows that this was a powerful, semi-sedentary, interdependent group with contacts in Eurasia to their west, and to their east in Mongolia and south in China.

It sets the Pazyryk Culture into the landscape using recent studies on climate, technology, human and animal DNA, and local resources. It shows that this was a powerful, semi-sedentary, interdependent group with contacts in Eurasia to their west, and to their east in Mongolia and south in China.

Are All Warriors Male? is a lively inquiry into questions of gender on the ancient Eurasian steppes. The book's contributors are archaeologists who work in eastern Europe, Central Asia, and eastern Asia, and this volume is the result of their field research in this vast. As little has been written about the evidence of gender roles in ancient-or modern-pastoralist societies, this book helps to fill an empty niche in our understanding of how sexual roles and identities have shaped and been shaped by such social and cultural circumstances. Are All Warriors Male? is a groundbreaking work that challenges current conceptions about the development of human societies in this great cauldron of humanity.

The roles of women in Chinese archaeology, with only a few exceptions, have at worst been overlooked, and at best consigned to conventional Marxist theory that prescribes formulaic frameworks for understanding gender - until now. Renowned archaeologist Katheryn M. Linduff and fellow researcher Yan Sun have brought together a fascinating collection that reexamines gender in ancient Chinese cultures. Acknowledging and negotiating the complications that challenge their efforts, the authors analyze and begin to reconstruct the roles of women in various regions of China from the late Neolithic to the early Empire period. Topics range from mortuary ritual, social status and structures of power, economic influences on cultural practice, textile production, and art in these early Chinese societies. This book is a must for students, professors, and practitioners of archaeology that seek a more complete examination of the archaeological record, for scholars in the fields of Asian Studies, Art History, and Chinese History more generally, as well as for those interested in the roles of women in ancient Chinese society.

This volume examines the role of objects in the region north of early dynastic state centers, at the intersection of Ancient China and Eurasia, a large area that stretches from Xinjiang to the China Sea, from c.3000 BCE to the mid-eighth century BCE. This area was a frontier, an ambiguous space that lay at the margins of direct political control by the metropolitan states, where local and colonial ideas and practices were reconstructed transculturally. These identities were often merged and displayed in material culture. Types of objects, styles, and iconography were often hybrids or new to the region, as were the tomb assemblages in which they were deposited and found. Patrons commissioned objects that marked a symbolic vision of place and person and that could mobilize support, legitimize rule, and bind people together. Through close examination of key artifacts, this book untangles the considerable changes in political structure and cultural makeup of ancient Chinese states and their northern neighbors.