M. Stark – Archaeology of Asia

Автор: M. Stark
Название книги: Archaeology of Asia
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Археология
Страницы: 381
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

This introduction to the archaeology of Asia focuses on case studies from the region’s last 10,000 years of history.

Comprises fifteen chapters by some of the world’s foremost Asia archaeologists
Sheds light on the most compelling aspects of Asian archaeology, from the earliest evidence of plant domestication to the emergence of states and empires
Explores issues of cross-cultural significance, such as migration, urbanism, and technology
Presents original research data that challenges readers to think beyond national and regional boundaries
Synthesizes work previously unavailable to western readers

This volume offers an archaeology of Asia whose geographic coverage ranges from
the equator to the upper latitudes, and from the South China Sea to the lakes of
eastern Kazakhstan. For many readers picking up this book, their first question is
likely,“Why Asia?”The answer is fourfold: Asia is vast; it is diverse; its history merits
comparison with other regions of the world; and for the last century Western archaeologists
have largely ignored Asia’s archaeology. The primary goal of this volume is
to bring to the fore Asia’s past as part of world archaeology by including case studies
on subjects of global archaeological interest.
Asia is vast in geographic, demographic, economic, and political terms. Physically,
Asia constitutes the world’s largest landmass, contains a large percentage of
the world’s population, and all of the world’s institutionalized religions. Three of
the world’s four most populous countries today (China, India, Indonesia) are found
in Asia. Countries across the region are becoming the world’s economic and political
superpowers, and these developments represent the endpoints of millennia-long
histories. The region’s geographic size is so large, and the internal divisions (particularly
between South, East, and Southeast Asia) so pronounced that a single
volume can only hope to capture a sense of its history.
The Asian land mass also encompasses extraordinarily high social, ethnolinguistic,
and ecological variability. Ecologically, the region stretches from the arctic
to the equatorial. Its multiple social histories intersect and overlap, and ethnolinguistic
groups span large areas. Studying ancient Asia requires the use of
multiscalar approaches that transcend both neoevolutionary frameworks that
archaeologists so commonly embrace, and also modern nation-state boundaries
that blur the borders of ancient polities and interactional networks. Even today,
Asia’s industrial centers and high-tech cities exist alongside lowland peasant farmers
and upland swidden cultivators.These farming communities continue to trade with
small-scale forest foragers across parts of India, and nomadic pastoralists in western
China. Coastal strandlopers across Southeast Asia barter with settled villagers, and both struggle with pirates in the Southeast Asian seas. Such relationships between
groups practicing different economic strategies have deep historical roots, as state
economies across ancient Asia were founded on the coexistence of forest and
maritime foraging strategies with agrarian economies.
In many respects, Asia is unique. This is clear through its archaeological record,
which contains distinctive hominoid and hominid varieties during the Pleistocene,
unusual subsistence adaptations from the Holocene, and singular complex polities
from the last three millennia that lack analogues elsewhere in the world.This record
challenges neoevolutionary frameworks that continue to dominate Americanist
research on emergent complexity, despite nearly 30 years of critique. The early
Holocene transition to sedentary agricultural life, for example, took varied forms
across Asia and occurred at very different points in time (Underhill and Habu, this
volume). In addition, myriad forms of foraging (for example, hunting, gathering,
maritime and pastoral nomadism) persisted across Asia and many evolved in
lockstep with ancient states (Morrison, this volume).
Asia’s archaeological record is also known for some “firsts.”The geographer Carl
Sauer (1952), for example, was one of the first scholars to recognize Asia as a hearth
for the origins of agriculture: some of the world’s earliest domesticated plants are
found in Asia (Crawford, this volume). The world’s earliest pottery technologies
also appeared more than 12,000 years ago among complex Jomon huntergatherers
in Japan (Underhill and Habu, this volume). Asia is also the linguistic and
genetic origin area for populations that settled island archipelagoes across the entire
Pacific Ocean (Bellwood, this volume). Yet Asia’s uniqueness does not render it
incomparable to developments elsewhere in the Old and New Worlds, and understanding
Asia’s ancient histories is integral to explaining developments across the
Eurasian continent.
Several discrete writing systems functioned across Asia by ca. 3500 B.P.
(Keightley, this volume), and some of the world’s largest early states and empires
emerged in ancient China (Shelach and Pines, this volume; Allard, this volume).
Complex polities arose along the region’s coasts, in conjunction with far-flung trade
overland, and maritime networks and ideological movements that spread from
South Asia to the eastern most reaches of the region (Ray, this volume). Early states
appeared in most of Asia’s river deltas and fertile river valleys, and many South
Asian states developed into empires (Sinopoli, this volume). States also developed
along the borders of Asia’s empires, among sedentary farmers and among pastoralist
nomads (Honeychurch and Amartuvshin, this volume). Linking farmers with pastoral
nomads and foragers (Morrison, this volume), these systems merged coastal
and inland regions and moved goods, animals, and people thousands of kilometers
within Asia, and from Asia westward.
The foregoing discussion has emphasized Asia’s size, its diversity, and its uniqueness;
yet the region’s archaeological sequence also merits comparison with other
parts of the world. The Asian archaeological record is a fundamental aspect of
organizational and environmental changes since the Pleistocene, and thousands of
trained archaeologists study and manage its cultural heritage. Despite the acceleration
in the pace of Asian archaeology since the 1960s, however, results of this research remain largely inaccessible to the Western archaeological world in part for
linguistic reasons. A burgeoning Asian archaeological literature is regularly published
in more than ten languages, and Asia’s archaeological past remains a foreign
country to most archaeologists trained in Europe and North America. Even archaeologists
working within different Asian countries have difficulty reading across their
national boundaries.
Those of us who have had the opportunity to work in Asian archaeology are constantly
impressed by the amount and intensity of research undertaken in the region,
and by how little of that work is visible in the western-language literature. Asia’s
huge geographic scale, its historical importance to cultural developments in the
West, and its overwhelming cultural diversity make it a rich source of comparative
material on subjects ranging from the origins of agriculture to state formation.
Growing numbers of archaeologists and historians now acknowledge Asian archaeology’s
relevance to world archaeology, and increased numbers of Western archaeologists
have launched research projects in Asia in the last 15 years.Yet continued
difficulties in accessing the Asian archaeological literature were a central reason for
the construction of this volume.
Chapter topics for the volume were selected with dual objectives in mind: the
first was to foreground some of the more noteworthy aspects of the archaeological
sequence and of the rich datasets that are available for study. The second was to
provide comparative information on social issues for archaeologists working elsewhere
in the world. Space constraints, relative to the size of the landmass that this
volume showcases, require a light touch rather than an in-depth exploration.We
encourage readers to use this volume as a springboard for learning more about
Asian archaeology, and for incorporating Asian material into their comparative
research worldwide.