ancient highlands of southwest china

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

Advance praise for

� e Ancient Highlands of Southwest China

“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 ar-chaeological 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

“� is archaeological history of Han China’s southern frontier explores local elites’ confrontation with the state’s imperial reach through time. In synthesiz-ing textual and archaeological materials from Southwest China, Yao’s mortu-ary and landscape study o ers valuable insights for comparative studies of agents who alternately created, sustained, and resisted ancient empires.”

Miriam T. Stark, University of Hawai’i, Mānoa

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. � eir 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 � rst millennium BC. In the � rst 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 di erent political temporalities. � e 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 a� liations 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. � e book extends approaches to empires to show how prehistoric time frames continue to shape the futures of frontier subjects despite imperial e orts to unify space and histories.

: : :Oxford Studies in the Archaeology of Ancient States

Series Editors Friederike Fless, Li Liu, Deborah L. Nichols, and D. T. Potts The Ancient Highlands of Southwest China

From the Bronze Age to the Han Empirea lice yao

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ncient Highlands of Southwest China

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Cover design: Kristina Kachele Design, llcCover image: Bronze cowrie shell container depicting equestrian hunt scene. Excavated from grave 71, Shizhaishan cemetery, Yunnan, China. Image reproduced with permission from © Cultural Relics Press

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Introduction

In 1956, archaeologists discovered a gold seal bearing the Chinese inscription “king of Dian” in a burial site located on a hill named Stone Fortress Hill in Yunnan, China (Yunnan 1959). Though a singular find, the generous size of the seal and its iconic snake-shaped embossment were unmistakable features of a Chinese court seal, raising questions about Chinese imperial history in the borderlands (Figure I.1). Archaeologists referred to Chinese textual sources that described the Han emperor’s bestowal of such a seal on a pacified barbarian king in the Lake Dian basin in 109 bc. The discovery of this so-called last king of Dian after nearly two millennia of obscurity both showed the ability of Chinese archae-ology to rescue history and brought a traditionally non-Chinese, wayward, and marginal location into the greater historical narrative of China. This kingly per-sonage not only verified textual accounts of Han expansion into the far south by 100 bc but validated the historicity and location of conquest, which also made this “barbarian” society relevant for history. Where before 1956 there was a pervasive absence of history—the ruggedness of southwest China’s topography was seen as barrier to civilization—history was now present and reset to 109 bc, which, as far as archaeology is concerned, is relatively precise.

Discovering the historicity of the Dian made the past of one of China’s many borderlands known, but opened subsequent archaeological finds to the vagaries of time telling. To which event, historical personage, or documented barbarian group can these finds be assigned? In the fifty-plus years following the discovery of the king of Dian, other seals of far poorer quality bearing murky inscriptions have been found (Figure I.1). Buried with local tribal elites following Han con-quest, some seals identify individuals by their royal titles and some provide only Chinese personal names. Personal, or individualized, seals, which were far more prevalent but lacking documentary recognition, were taken as evidence of the

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2 Introduction

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Figure I.1Bronze seals found in southwest China. (1) The gold seal bearing the inscription “Dian wang zhiyin” (King of Dian); (2) Bronze seal with tortoise embossment bearing the inscription “Pu Han zhiyin” (King of Pu Han) (redrawn from Yunnan et al. 2002, 105); (3) bronze seal with inscription “Li De” (Lijiashan cemetery); (4) Sheng Xi (Shizhaishan 20); and (5) “Shou zhi ren” (Lijiashan cemetery). (Photographed by author).

local adoption of Han values (sinicization or huahua). In contrast, official seals like that of the king of Dian should have been carefully recorded by dynastic chroni-clers, who, as good practitioners of history, would have been attentive to official events. When a titular seal inscription neither resembles Chinese court proto-types nor corresponds with documented events, however, the past risks obscu-rity and becomes quasi-legendary. Yet the only other “kingly” Han seal found in southwest China, an odd combination of royal insignia carved on uncharacteris-tic bronze rather than imperial gold, has led to such a historical problem. This per-son identified by the name “king of Pu Han” lacks textual presence, but remains a strong contender for one of the many petty tribal leaders noted in Han texts as contemporaries of the last king of Dian. He comes across as both a semilegendary figure and a sinicized and possibly literate barbarian, whose enigmatic identity



Introduction 3

this book examines alongside his unknown contemporaries. In trying to give an account of these “kings,” then, the book project compels a wider inquiry into the political history of frontier.

For archaeologists and historians, History (capitalized for emphasis) is the descriptive and explanatory framework in which to situate and order people, events, and innovations over time and intuit the process of change. However, the questions surrounding the king of Pu Han highlight a different problem of histo-ricity, one that has been central to anthropological inquiry but has only recently gained the attention of archaeologists. Where History refers to the positioning of happenings of sociopolitical significance in chronological time, historicity is experiential, referring to the “human perception of being in time” (Hirsch and Stewart 2005, 263). The latter, then, emphasizes a relationship to the past and future in the present that imparts forms of historical consciousness. In the case of the two kingly personages, their seals imply something about conceptions of self as subjects in an imperial dynastic order folding in both politics and time. Both History and historicity capture the immediacy of the past, asking how these local figureheads and elites dealt with the event (conquest) and experienced life as imperial subjects (postconquest). The year 109 bc was presumably a volatile one, and significant social transformations in the experience of everyday life along the southwestern frontier were likely. Extraordinary circumstances were contentious, causing local peoples to question their places, traditions, and identities in the face of a new social order. The king of Pu Han, as well as other local contemporaries buried with Chinese seals, was caught up in this process of change.

So far these personages from southwestern China were not unique but strad-dled a temporal and cultural divide familiar to other co-opted imperial and colo-nial agents along the fringes of other expansionary states—Greek, Rome, Aztec, Inca, Vijayanagara, and British India (Alcock 2002; Dietler 2010; Sinopoli and Morrison 1994; Schreiber 2001; D’Altroy 1992; Brumfiel 1987; Cohn 1989; Wells 1998). Confronted with the contradictions and tensions introduced by “foreign” political regimes, these local individuals appropriated imperial practices in response to competing interests emerging from multilateral realities. Like numer-ous other studies of imperial formations, this book is interested in how identities and traditions were altered when the local was drawn into the global aftermath. Recent archaeological approaches that view colonialism and imperialism as a pro-tracted and tenuous process would argue that the desire for these seals illustrates how “indigenous people frequently retain or remake identities and traditions” in negotiating cultural predicaments (Silliman 2005, 59). While insights from postco-lonial theory have reinvigorated the study of imperial formations in archaeology, identities unavoidably become politicized categories contested through cultural idioms. No longer are the conquered envisaged as acculturated subjects; rather,



4 Introduction

they are viewed as engaged in a constant process of reinvention—chameleons in a hostile political niche. The bearers of titular seals can be seen as cleverly insinuating themselves on to the global stage through the symbolism of Han royalty—never mind that, from the Han perspective, the same cultural idiom in the hands of the conquered signifies loyalty to the empire. Imperial identities are inherently subversive, here capitalizing on a play between royal and loyal.

Identity politics is both edifying and problematic. Followed to its logical con-clusion, social action and cultural identity are both illusory and transitory. The problem with the study of identity is that investigators tend to limit the point of reference from which cultural forms gain representation and meaning to that of ruler/subject and empire/periphery. As the seals show, the inclusion of an explic-itly Han artifact could both invoke the event of conquest and evoke the location of self in imperial space. Personal experience and culture are brought to bear on the event, leading to a local kind of historicity (Sahlins 1985). In effect, the social significance of these artifacts may rely far less on their direct prescribed cultural meanings (109 bc, royal title, empire) than on their revelatory potential. In other words, “if things mediate our historicity, we cannot be content to ask only what meanings people attribute to them now,” but must also anticipate their future meanings (Keane 2005, 119).

While the politics of imperialism presupposes cultural differentiation, this relationship is not immediate and depends on perspective and the frame of ref-erence. Certainly the use of Chinese political symbols and inscriptional styles indicates familiarity with dynastic trends, but to see such symbols as simply indi-vidual attempts to gain prominence in the imperial order—a play on royal and loyal—divests the action of cultural meaning. Of the possible Han artifacts bear-ing Chinese characters, why did southwestern individuals choose seals in particu-lar and proceed to copy them? What importance did the written word hold for conquered peoples who, prior to 109 bc, had no writing system? As the book will show, the answer is not so obvious, and neither are imperial identities.

In raising this question, this book speaks to a familiar concern with the mate-riality of imperialism. How did cultural artifacts, when used out of the context of their production, become objects of local value and meaning? From which frames of reference can archaeologists logically infer local material meanings when the class of objects is laden with foreign values? Moreover, what do their appropriations say about imperial identities? It may come as a surprise that in the archaeology of the Han Empire (206 bc–ad 22), such questions have yet to be asked. Excavations across the ancient frontier presently encompassing North Korea, Mongolia, and Vietnam document the intermingling of many objects of Han origin in the native material assemblages. But archaeologists largely see these consumption patterns as emulative in scope and evidence of sinicization or even Confucianization, the



Introduction 5

acceptance of moral values set forth by the Chinese philosopher Confucius (Pai 1992). In this view, objects, irrespective of their quality or quantity, represent the same imperial process at work. A Chinese iron hoe and crossbow bear the same cultural meaning as a seal and a coin.

In using the Chinese seals as an illustrative example, then, I intend to embark on a different approach to the paradigmatic issue of identity in imperial forma-tions. That the two titular seals were found only in the graves of local leaders—the last remaining anchors to a “native” past—makes time and the body important starting points from which identity ought to be explored. If History (the sequence of conquest, issued edicts, and skirmishes) and historicity are here mutually impli-cated in a self-fashioning, then time—the relationship these leaders held of the past, present, and future—offers an important analytic to examine how cultural actions gain potency through the possibilities they offer. With this framework in mind, I begin to examine how personal time, embodied in rites of passage such as funerals, was experienced alongside a public or collective time that was subject to imperial directives. Besides the allusions to time connected with these seals, other material practices constitutive of this Bronze Age funerary tradition are also examined for how they contend with conditions of expected impermanence.

Cultural transformations, as this book finds, unfolded as individuals attempted to reconcile divergent forms of contingency in the aftermath of conquest. Or, as Yogi Berra succinctly stated, “The future ain’t what it used to be” (quoted in Puett 2008, 190). The question, which will be expanded upon in chapter 1, is thus not whether these seals were understood as instantiations of Han history, reflecting an acculturation to imperial time and order. Rather, the book inquires into the conditions that made such seals a possibility and thereby opened up a temporal horizon to different eventualities.

: : :

The Han and the Southern Reaches

Before advancing the book’s theoretical propositions further, I want to contextu-alize the historical and cultural dimensions of interaction between central plains “Chinese” states and societies to the south. This background redirects the con-tracted emphasis placed on 109 bc toward the processes leading up to and follow-ing imperial consolidation. In addition, as the terms of engagement are laid out they will sound increasingly familiar, showcasing why the Chinese case is relevant for comparison with other ancient empire formations.

Occupying the mountainous ranges extending out of the Tibetan plateau, southwest China sits at the geographic crossroads connecting China, Tibet, and mainland Southeast Asia (Figure I.2). The strategic importance of the region



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Introduction 7

began to emerge in the late second millennium bc when contact with Eurasia and Southeast Asia led to the formation of bronze-using cultures (Chiou-Peng 2013; Yang 2009). By the early to mid-first millennium bc, societies in central Yunnan began to play an increasing role as intermediaries in the extension of trade involv-ing the Ba-Shu in Sichuan, steppic groups occupying the Tibetan plateau, and polities in Southeast Asia. Restricted resources (cowrie shells, ivory, salt, precious stones, silver, gold, and tin), slaves, and horses circulated along this network of interconnected but culturally distinct societies as precious exotics (Yang Bin 2009, 44). In effect the movement of goods not only connected disparate cultures, but also created the lowland-highland framework of the regional political economy. For instance, cowrie shells, which continued to serve as a form of regional cur-rency from the prehistoric period well into the fourteenth century ad, originated from the Indian Ocean and were carried upriver and over interior passes before reaching highland societies on the Southwest Silk Road.

By the mid-first millennium bc, the frequency and intensity of exchange cre-ated greater economic incentives. The wealth generated from cross-regional trade contributed to the simultaneous fluorescence of bronze using polities such as the Dian, Yelang, and pastoral groups known as the Kunming in southwest China, and peer groups, such as the Dongson, in northern Vietnam and the Ailao in Myanmar (Figure I.2) (Higham 1996; Moore 2007; Nam et al. 2010). The elaborate display of precious exotics and bronze vessels in the graves of these groups sug-gest entrenched social hierarchies (Lee 2002; Yao 2005), caches of cowrie often being placed with select individuals. The emergence of economic interdependen-cies linking these cultures also culminated in a set of political ideologies shared by pan-regional elites, which was most vividly symbolized by the bronze tympanum drum (kettledrum), an instrument of authority and war (Figure I.3). Found across lowland and highland contexts, these drums were later transformed into cowrie shell containers in the Dian region and into containers for caching weaponry in northern Vietnam as these two regional societies became economically powerful. However effective this political synergy may have been in cultivating relations of mutuality, competition and hostilities ran high between these peer societies. Political rivalry and the number of social factions escalated, intensifying tribal and territorial divisions as evidenced by the rise of bronze weaponry produc-tion across the region (see chapters 3 and 4). The Dian bronze drums iconically stress these ethnic rivalries by intentionally depicting war victims in dress styles and carrying weaponry different from that of the Dian warrior (Figure I.3) (Tong Enzheng 1991; Wang Ningsheng 1989).

Far from being a geographic and cultural isolate, southwest societies par-ticipated in a growing sphere of cross-cultural interaction that evolved over several centuries, designated by archaeologists as the Bronze Age, before Han



8 Introduction

contact. As explored in chapters 3 and 4, during this first phase of regional engagement (ninth through fourth centuries bc), the outlines of a political geography began to emerge, one where the expansion of intertribal ties and novel forms of transactions led to the differentiation of territorial networks and cultural identities. Any contact with metropolitan cultures of Chinese states prior to the fifth century bc was a rare occurrence and probably filtered through traders in Sichuan who moved goods between China and southwest China (Figure I.2). One could even argue for a distinctive Bronze Age histori-cal trajectory, were it not for conquest. It was not until the arrival of the Qin envoy in central Yunnan (221–207 bc) that direct contact with traditions of the central plains became established and recorded.

Southwest China was merely one of the many regions that initially attracted the Qin and later fueled the ambitions of the Han state. The expansion of the Han Empire (206 bc–ad 220) was the first episode of a lengthy engagement with peo-ples beyond the boundaries of the Chinese sphere, where attempts to integrate different cultural traditions created new contingencies altogether different from conditions of contact and exchange. Extending from present-day Mongolia to North Korea and Vietnam, the Han Empire paralleled Rome in its spatial reach

Figure I.3Bronze kettledrums excavated from the Yunnan region. The drums were buried with elite individuals at the sites of Shizhaishan (top) (redrawn from Zhang Zengqi 1997, 160); Lijiashan 69 (bottom left) (redrawn from Yunnan et al. 2007, 120); and Batatai 69 (bottom right) (redrawn from Yunnan et al. 2002, 72).



Introduction 9

and cultural breadth. With an estimated population of 74 million in ad 2, the Han state employed an impressive 130,000 public servants to oversee the affairs of the empire (Loewe 2006) (Figure I.2). Encounters with this vast ecological and cultural landscape have led historians to refer to this period as China’s first ethnographic awakening (Di Cosmo 2004; Lloyd 2004), and recent archaeologi-cal work has begun to shed light on the frontier landscape and the materiality of the Han Empire (Chen and Shelach 2015; Erickson, Songmi, and Nylan 2010). In this evolving context of cultural engagement and expansion, the Han came to define foreign groups according to perceived differences in subsistence, dress, customs, and political leadership (Allard 1998; Di Cosmo 2004; Wang 1989; Yu Ying-shih 1967). Far from being simple descriptions of foreign peoples, these accounts reflect an imperial valuation system defined by cultural distance from Han norms.

From about 133 bc, texts begin to document Han expansion into the southwest (Sun and Xiong 1983, 244). Han forays into a region of hostile terrain and peoples were sparked by an ambitious program of consolidating interregional trade. Han exploration of this highland route aimed to establish a viable alternative to the northern Silk Road, where frequent attacks by nomads threatened the lucrative trade of China with Bactria and the Hellenic worlds. Of the numerous societies documented by Han historians in the second century bc, the Dian and the Yelang were the most powerful, with stratified political systems and settled agrarian life-styles in contrast to the nomadic and pastoral groups deemed to be too hostile for engagement. According to the Shiji,

The king of Dian possessed a force of some 20,000 to 30,000 men, while to the northeast of him lived the tribes of Laojin and Mimo which were ruled by members of the same clans as himself and were in a position to aid him (transl. Watson 1993, 295–96).

Occupying lacustrine plains and riverine marshes in this otherwise rugged and mountainous region, the territories of Dian, Laojin, and Mimo (Figure I.2) also had the potential for intensive rice cultivation. By gaining control over these high-land polities, the Han acquired a foothold and substantial manpower to further consolidate a loosely connected network, as the empire’s Qin predecessors had envisaged.

When Han imperial agents encountered the king of Dian in 122 bc, they were asked, “Which is larger, my domain or that of the Han ruler?” (Watson 1993, 257). Such ignorance and conceit, as recounted by the Han court historian Sima Qian, confirmed the suspected inferiority of these tribal peoples and provided the rai-son d’être for Han’s civilizing mission. The rhetoric of mission civilisatrice is not



10 Introduction

unique to modern colonial regimes. Its use extends back to earlier political exper-imentations with empire: the Greeks employed the term nomoi (universal law); the Romans, the term humanitas; and the Chinese, the idea of huaxia.1 Beyond force and coercion, the Han used cultural and moral imperatives to justify con-quest and subsequent rule. The art of imperial persuasion in East Asia—a dis-course about subject making—sees its ontogeny in the Han period. Societies like the Dian, Yelang, and Mimo, which already shared a livelihood similar to that of the Han, could conceivably be reasoned with using cultural incentives, primar-ily Han goods such as silk and iron tools (Yu Ying-shih 1967). The distribution of Han goods, a pervasive feature in tomb assemblages not just in the southwest but across Mongolia, Korea, and Vietnam, was intended to both inculcate and culti-vate the values and practices of civilization.

After conquering numerous polities along the southern frontier with both force and diplomacy in 111 bc, the Han campaign saw the Dian and their allies as the last remaining hurdles to Han consolidation of the southern frontier. Before gain-ing control over the fertile plains of the Dian, however, the Han had to bypass the Laojin and Mimo (Figure I.2), who, according to Han accounts, eventually fell to Han forces, thus securing Dian’s surrender. Two decades after early encounters with the Han, the political contours of loosely aligned polities were consolidated into a unified frontier. For most historians of China’s southern region (Schafer 1967; Wiens 1967), Han frontier policy presented a nascent form of indirect impe-rialism that was more interested in establishing a “jurisdictional” rather than a “territorial” form of sovereignty, one based on patron-client relations (Herman 2007, 70). Using the incentives of rewards and appointment to high office, the Han state courted the allegiance of local chiefs to administer the region on their behalf. This policy of “loose rein administration” (jimi) considered appeasement and conciliation to be more effective than force at stirring the social conscience of bar-barians and at changing their perverse nature (Took 2007, 25). Distance and the rugged topography of the southwest highlands simply made direct interventions too costly for the state. Archaeological investigations, as this book shows, go far in muddling this conventional view. Not unlike later episodes of Chinese expansion-ism (after the fifteenth century), a military presence, population relocations, and

1 The term “Xia” or “Huaxia,” rather than “Han,” is used here because Han was more likely a politi-cal reference in ancient China. Not until much later did Han become an ethnic category. The term “Han” was used by outsiders such as the Xiongnu to designate the people of that political empire, not an ethnic group. As an autonym, Xia referred to the diverse peoples who lived in the central plains region and observed the classical traditions of the Zhou state. According to Brindley (2003), the Xia identity embodied cultural ideals thought to be transmitted through lineages and personal cultiva-tion. The term captures the inclusive nature of group identity in ancient China.



Introduction 11

land-grabs rearranged earlier territories and geographic networks in the south-west frontier.

Even historical texts inadvertently reveal the encroachments of Han occupation. The subjugated groups that once constituted this extensive Bronze Age system were incorporated into Yi Prefecture, a Han administrative unit with an esti-mated population of 580,463 (History of the Former Han Dynasty, “Monograph on Geography”) (Swann 1950). Imperial administration, placed under the rule of a central governor in the Dian heartland, quickly proved to be unpopular. In first forty years after conquest, frontier life was characterized by periodic frag-mentation, reintegration, and a general fragility or impermanence of the political order. Textual records document at least five major rebellions across two prov-inces occupied by former Bronze Age tribal polities; the first occurred in 105 bc, and there were two particularly violent episodes in 83 bc and ad 16, the latter culminating in the murder of the Han governor (Figure I.4) (Sun and Xiong 1983, 247–49). These accounts tell of the violence that ensued under Han consolidation and the impossibility of integration through moral persuasion. If imperial con-solidation had run a harmonious course, textual descriptions of the southwest natives would perhaps have been fewer. Yet civil strife, which apparently left tens of thousands either dead or as captured prisoners, took place right in the Dian heartland. Remnants of these fortified earthen walls can still be found at Han settlements in Yunnan (Yao and Jiang 2012).

Seen from this sequence of events, the imperial period was characterized by intense uncertainty and brutality. In the eleven years following initial con-tact, Han conquest swept the entire region. Fifteen years after conquest, local

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12 Introduction

populations rebelled and successive revolts erupted less than every twenty years thereafter (Figure I.4) across Yizhou and Zangge Provinces or modern-day east-ern Yunnan, western Guizhou, and Guangxi Provinces. The segmentation of imperial life into periods of upheaval gives the impression that change was always imminent as Bronze Age societies confronted forces beyond their ability to pre-dict. Here, historicity or the local experience of imperial life cannot escape the unfolding of events in an account of History. The temporality of social experience contracted into cycles fluctuating between social unrest and regime change. Yet the account of rebellions recorded in textual sources also represents how imperial agents objectified their own anxieties, capturing but one of many temporalities of imperialism. The compression of events spoke to the urgency of the frontier situation as provincial officials appealed to the central Han authority—often unsuccessfully—for troops to restore control. Simultaneously, the frequency and regularity of rebellion also made the frontier increasingly legible for political observation and debate, an object open to historical explanation. Read against this historiographic thread, however, local subjects lived in a state of violence, anarchy, and Han oppression. Social experience was both compressed and fateful (Sewell 2005, 6).

: : :

Why Use Time as a Focus of Frontier Dynamics?

Time, I argue, is central to a study of imperial rule but not solely for the after-effects of that rule. Though time has been broached primarily as a rup-turing consequence of imperial rule, in this book I foreground time as a lens with which to examine the entanglements that produced relations of domina-tion and resistance (Dietler 2010; Wernke 2013). Whether by the incorporation of barbarian persons into dynastic histories or the absorption of local labor into the imperial economy, states intervene in the lives of their subjects by regulat-ing political time (Tilly 1994). However, one of the unintended consequences of instituting state time is not only revolt, as described above, but also the challenge of enforcing a History that can manage and mask difference. The latter phenom-enon, I argue, is fertile ground for archaeological intervention and for countering the view that there is more history in the metropole. To understand how time becomes politicized on the frontier, stoking the historical consciousness of local subjects, it is necessary to trace the temporal frames in which social life, mate-rial relations, and hierarchies were embedded during the Bronze Age. The book makes an intervention by addressing the local temporal logics that both medi-ated the frictions of political time and brought contradictions of imperial rule to light.



Introduction 13

For example, the continuation of native funerary rituals as well as an indi-genization process based on assertions of tribal tradition subsequent to the Han period does not accord with a scenario of cultural fatefulness (Yang Bin 2009). Instead they suggest other historical sensibilities coming into play and collective actions aimed at differentiating political time from the center. Thus, a preoccupation with the first 150 years of imperial occupation to the exclu-sion of the preceding 800 years risks projecting a partial and totalizing view of political time. To this end, the first half of the book devotes needed attention to the temporal frameworks that shaped local relations to the past, present, and future, in particular as conveyed through mortuary rituals and traced through material, rather than discourse based, signs of history. The book therefore also engages with the political time of preliterate societies in the Bronze Age of southwest China.

Making political time as the focus of analysis, in turn, also upsets conceptions of conquest as an inevitable rupture rather than as a process-oriented phenom-enon. The fact that region-wide interaction intensified in the Bronze Age’s most flourishing centuries suggests that these societies were not isolated but active par-ticipants in networks of exchange. If the depictions of varying hairstyles and dress seen on Dian bronzes (Figure I.3) are any indication of cultural awareness, strang-ers were not just a homogeneous “other” but a differentiated lot. Rather than rep-resenting a moment that defied local explanation or experience, the Han envoy merely followed in the trail of other foreign intruders. These past cultural encoun-ters provided the conceptual basis for reckoning Han encroachment and for tak-ing appropriate actions. In effect, another kind of temporality to imperialism was experienced through a recursive process whereby the synchronic event became interwoven with a familiar past (Sahlins 1985). An understanding of the histo-ricity of imperial subjects (and of cultural change) thus requires a consideration of synchronic perceptions attuned to diachronic experiences (Sewell 2005). For frontier subjects, imperial life implies varying temporalities, experienced not only along the segmented durations of conquest, revolt, and restoration of regimes but also as recursive.

Because the uncertainty of the future can also destabilize the flow of time, imperialism can be perceived as a state of impermanence—perhaps each rebellion experienced as an end or as yet another transition. Given the frequency of rebel-lions, individuals experienced at least one episode of violence in their lifetimes. The physical relocation of populations, which will be examined in chapter 6, uprooted communities and further weakened the ties that held social and inter-generational relations in place. This sense of impermanence, to borrow from Nietzsche, was perceived as “the world finished in every single moment” and the present seen as an existential end in itself (Kaufmann 1977, 319). However, the kind



14 Introduction

of suspended temporality needs to be examined as a negotiated condition rather than a given. This sense of temporal disenfranchisement has been documented for ethnic minorities who, having neither a collective past nor a vision of the self in the future, view their group identity to be transformative (Bloch 1996, 224). By the same token, such a detachment might have offered the unlikely possibility of new beginnings.

By sorting through these varying temporalities of imperialism, I do not mean that social life was experienced as a uniquely recursive, a segmented, or a sus-pended process with no outlet to alternative futures. Rather, the intent is to explore conceptions of time beyond a restrictive framework of rupture in order to show how history, even for those “traditional” peoples suspended in prehis-tory, can encapsulate different constructions of contingency.

: : :

Archaeology and Historicity

Admittedly, archaeologists can neither solicit extant peoples for their perceptions of conquest nor reconstruct the durations of their experience. Yet it is precisely the diachronic and contextual nature of archaeological data that offers some dis-tance from the problems of an imperial History and moves toward a rapproche-ment with historicity. Because the archaeology of imperial frontiers presents an aggregate of drawn-out social practices spanning periods before and after con-quest, archaeologists have the potential to detect patterns of transmission, conti-nuity, and change across different kinds of social practices. Continuity can extend back as early as the initial settling of the region or to later periods of the Bronze Age. These varying scales of time depth show that present actions need not sim-ply respond to a generic past and neither were eventualities prefigured solely by conquest. Charting these cultural practices not only reveals how local traditions were invented or inverted over the course of time but also forces imperialism to be examined as a process unbeholden to single events. Understanding why traditions of differing historical duration persist or change reveals the particular interests that were at stake under Han rule. When imperialism is explored through this telescopic lens, the local present can be examined in a retracting and protracting relationship with the past and future. The archaeological context, in effect, affords an opportunity to examine cultural structures as they are put into action over and over again and by different social actors. Patterns of continuity and change—when viewed against these varying diachronic spans—can bring the contingencies of imperial experience to bear.

By further comparing these scales of time across different archaeologi-cal contexts, the experience of imperialism also becomes far less disjointed.



Introduction 15

Archaeologists working on imperialism and colonialism have begun to frame their studies as microhistories, positioned to highlight personal and individu-alized experiences under foreign rule in contrast to the generalizing views of the empire (Boozer 2010; Lightfoot 2005). Because the many contexts open to investigation—settlements, households, monuments, and (as in the case of many Han frontiers) cemeteries—present a diverse cross-section of cultural life, archaeologists are able to contrast macro- and microscale experiences of impe-rial temporality. For instance, because settlement systems represent the politi-cal organization of the landscape, patterns of change in the settlement system may be more attuned to the compressed temporal order of imperial rule as new centers were quickly established and former settlements removed or reshuffled. Cemeteries, in contrast, represent a place of ritual created through private and intimate attachments of kinship. As many anthropologists note, mortuary rituals operate on mythical or circular time (Van Gennep 1960; Lévi-Strauss 1966). In trying to counter the loss brought about by death, funerary rites emphasize acts of commemoration to recall the past in order to reproduce continuity. Of course, social relations constitutive of the political landscape may likely crosscut with those in the community of the dead. But it is precisely the metaphorically knot-ted nature of archaeological data that provides an opportunity to examine how individuals navigated the dissonance presented by recursive, contracted, and sus-pended processes of imperial time. How temporalities of the political landscape can possibly be synchronized with temporalities of kinship and biology is central to a construction of the self and of society. In this light, the conflation of meanings presented by the Chinese seals—as a marker of personal identity and as a sign of history—can be unpacked.

Drawing on a detailed study of mortuary monuments and settlements associ-ated with the Mimo and Dian, two Bronze Age polities in eastern Yunnan, this book seeks to weave together these strands of social life in order to apprehend local historicities in the making of imperial identities (Figure I.2).2 As allies to the Dian and the last line of defense against Han encroachment, the Mimo were part of the powerful Bronze Age system in central Yunnan that succumbed to the Han. Archaeological work in the last twenty years has shed much light on

2 Tribal names mentioned in Han texts are ethnonyms assigned by historians. While many Chinese archaeologists identify the Qujing basin as the Mimo homeland, Western archaeologists remain cautious in their interpretation of these cultural groups as territorially discrete societies. Only the location of the Dian peoples in the Lake Dian basin can be verified (due to the discovery of the king’s seal). The geographic location of the Mimo is hypothesized based on mention of their location north of the Dian. The Mimo is thus placed in quotations when discussed in relation to their putative geographic base.



16 Introduction

this polity, in particular in uncovering a rich mortuary tradition involving the creation of large cemetery mounds unlike anything previously found in China. Nestled in the Qujing alluvial basin, the presumed heartland of this society, these cemetery mounds were continuously maintained as active monuments for nearly a millennium (Yunnan et al. 2002). Resembling hillocks rising above the valley floor, these mounds were much like collective mausoleums that grew in scale as successive generations were interred. This book focuses specifically on the funerary activities undertaken by three separate communities, each occupy-ing a different position in the Mimo political order. Drawing on the record of the mounds from their inception to their eventual disuse in the postimperial period, I uncover the temporal scales at which personal and collective memories were evoked through funerary practices. Through a detailed diachronic analy-sis of commemorative practices across the three communities, the analysis then addresses how the Mimo and “Dian” commemorated their dead and remem-bered the past when confronted with Han imperial rule and a dynastic or institu-tional time. In other words, could Bronze Age biographical persons and lineages, especially those former chieftains like the Dian king, remain intelligible in an institutional Han order?

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Sources of Data on the Region

Since the period of history under investigation predates the nation-state of China by more than two millennia, it would be both shortsighted and anachronistic to frame this encounter as one between two homogeneous cultures and geographies. The Yunnan highland is geographically nested in a mosaic of linguistically and culturally diverse zones that James Scott (2009) has labeled zomia,3 which, as far back as the 1500 bc, was already being stitched together by societies trading in metals and crafts across the extent of Vietnam, Myanmar, and Thailand. The rem-nants of these tribes—modern-day Mon-Khmer, Tai, and Hmong speakers—are scattered across the borders of these nation-states and sometimes even move back and forth in disregard of political boundaries. Besides notable commonalities in language, material culture, and mythology, some tribes even trace their migra-tion out of southwest China (Fang Guoyu 1990; Herman 2009). Given this overlap

3 The historian Willem van Schendel of the University of Amsterdam coined the name Zomia in 2002 as a way of challenging the continent’s traditional geographical boundaries. James Scott (2009) makes a more ambitious argument and envisions Zomia as a region of hill tribes who through their rejection of modernity, technology, and statecraft offer a counterhistory of the evolution of human civilization. Bronze Age kingdoms therefore complicate the state of lawlessness and egalitarianism that Scott sees as intrinsic and eternal feature of hill tribe organization.



Introduction 17

across space and time, I draw on a wide array of sources ranging from archaeology, historiography, legends, ethnographies, and colonial documents. The similarities in material and ritual practices that appear and reappear across these sources and that persist through time should not be forsaken for the absence of an established contemporaneity. Instead, this uncanny reoccurrence forces anyone interested in zomia to consider why certain practices remain current despite their antiquated-ness and how they continue to inform local ideas of history and tradition.

This approach is not motivated by the need for an indigenous historiography or the production of an irreverent alternative to Chinese history but rather by the realization that in addressing a history of ethnic peoples however distant in time, the privileging of one source material may also reprise unstated power relations (Trouillot 1995). Texts are partial not only because they represent the imperial view. They become partial at the moment scholars decide on what constitutes an authoritative or reliable source. Archaeology does not offer an empirical antidote either. As there is currently a disjunctive rhythm to minority studies, the risk of any historical engagement with the broad area of zomia (modern-day southwest China) being relegated to the pseudo-discipline of ethnohistory (the study of eth-nic history) is a real concern. Why is an investigation into tribal pasts not history in its own right? Unlike historical, anthropological, and archaeological studies of ethnic minorities, I try to collapse the disciplinary boundaries between these domains in order to consider another interface for historical discussion, draw-ing on sets of the observations that may appear misaligned but that I neverthe-less consider complementary and worthwhile. Historians of the southwest tend to focus on the period from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century ad when mass Chinese migrations into the region make a compelling case for the study of the colonial state (Harrell 1995; Herman 2009; Took 2007; Hostetler 2001). Not only do textual sources and local gazetteers become abundant during this later period, but accounts of the region begin to reflect the perspective of the indigenous sub-ject. The independent development of a script by Zhuang and Yi minorities fur-ther generated a rich archive of oral histories, religious texts, geographic treatises, and local genealogies (Herman 2009). After the nineteenth century, ethnographic surveys produced by both French missionaries and British colonial regimes (most famously the anthropologist Edmund Leach and the novelist George Orwell) augmented our understanding of the linguistic, geographic, and cultural distri-butions of hill tribes extending from southwest China into Myanmar and Laos (Fiskesjö 2010).

Before the fifteenth century, however, the paucity of sources has made for an opaque history, one divided between (1) historiographies that describe the administrative absorption of barbarians, a sampling of which was given in this chapter, and (2) legendary accounts valorizing the victory of Chinese generals



18 Introduction

in southwest China (Peng 2011). Most scholars sense the surrender of an earlier identity of unknown antiquity across this region but are at a loss as to how they might “probe beyond a façade of the ethnic minority” (Faure and Ho 2013, 4). This historical quandary is well exemplified by bronze drums: the percussion of the instrument continued to inaugurate ancestral rites, feasts of merit, war dances, and trade across parts of Laos, Guangxi, and Yunnan. As recently as 1950, Chinese ethnologists documented the same kind of bronze kettledrum (Figure I.3) being used among the Zhuang in harvest rites—2,500 years after the initial emergence of the drums in central Yunnan. More interestingly, on October 30, 2007, a Miao headman in Guizhou named Yang Jinwen publicly unveiled a bronze seal that he claimed the Han emperor bestowed upon his seventy-fifth-generation ancestor in 109 bc, therefore identifying him as the descendant of the historical figure “king of Yelang,” one of the powerful tribal polities encountered, documented, and taken over by the Han Empire (Herman 2007).4 Never mind that the seal did not bear an inscription to that effect or that the number of generations being claimed suspiciously approximated that of the Kong (surname of Confucius) clan genealogy that began circa 550–479 bc.5 The four centuries separating the time of the Yelang king and Confucius, which presumably would have undermined the veracity of the Miao headman’s genealogical claims, did not appear to tarnish the authenticity of the seal. While scholars and historians challenged Yang Jinwen’s assertions, the government officially recognized the seal (Herman 2007, 251).

These retentions and historical claims gesture toward correspondences with the Bronze Age that I find difficult to ignore. In order to get beyond the “façade of the ethnic minority” and move toward a history other than ethnohistory, I believe that claims like the one made by the Miao headman Yang Jinwen, which might otherwise be ignored as hearsay or a potential legend in the making, constitute an important category of observation. It probably comes as no surprise that Yang Jinwen is not an original but is preceded by many others like him in history, par-ticularly in the form of semilegendary figures who dotted textual accounts from the second century bc into the fourteenth century. The kings of Dian and Pu han are not strangers to this group.

4 Yang Jinwen’s announcement was widely covered in both local and national media. China’s Central Television’s coverage of the story can be accessed through their English website (www.china.org.cn/english/culture/230489.htm).

5 Confucius lineage records are carefully kept and copied by the Kong family (Jun Jing). Between 1937 and 2009, the master genealogy remained in the protection of the clan elder. The updated version consists of an eighty-volume genealogy and lists more than 2 million descendants.



Introduction 19

As a starting point, legends and myths that arrive by way of ethnographic and historical transmission are important in their own right, for these accounts may mark and commemorate specific events as well as their locations (Took 2007). For instance, the campaigns of Chinese generals into the southwest crossed val-leys coincident with places where bronze drums were once buried or where par-ticular drum cults were formerly active and subsequently suppressed (Peng 2011). Through memory and oral transmission that cycle these places and events across time, we become more intimate with “an indigenous geography that blends with historiography of conquest” (Faure and Ho 2013, 5). If the events and legends with which drums are connected and the places (hills and valleys) where they circu-lated coincide with recovered Bronze Age landmarks and sites, then it is possible that a specific geography is being remembered and inscribed. In tacking back and forth between archaeology, historiography, and derived stories, an enlivened his-tory of places and landscapes can also recover an indigenous engagement with the past and future.

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Organization of the Volume

The book is organized into three parts. How time is culturally constructed becomes the logical starting point for discussion. The first part, which contextualizes this book within broader anthropological inquiries of historicity, change, and continu-ity, comprises of two chapters. Chapter 1, “History Regained in Prehistory,” ques-tions the temporal rupture implied in conquest by asking both what is at stake in the historical consciousness of native actors and how to approach, in the absence of a local documentary tradition, their engagement with pasts and unprecedented futures under imperial rule. Drawing on anthropological works on historicity and historical consciousness (Bloch 1986; Geertz 1983; Lambek 1998; Munn 1992; Sahlins 1985; Feeley-Harnik 1978), chapter 1 presents the theoretical foundations concerning how time and cultural identification become interlocked in historical process. Revisiting the models of linear and circular time frames while noting the problematic dichotomy of Western/non-Western cultures, the first chapter shifts emphasis to how the past is articulated with the present along these dis-tinctive frames, imbuing time flows with particular charges and capacities. These two temporal modalities shape actions in ways that fill durations with constancy and anticipation, which, instead of compromising or precluding, convey possibili-ties for mediating change and continuity. Attending therefore to people’s engage-ment with time as a kind of quality, rather than quantity, is crucial and I develop the concept of “temporal dispositions” to refer to these potential agencies that inhere in the experience of time’s durations. I examine the analytical purchase of



20 Introduction

this concept by redeploying the concept of memory in my approach. By focusing on “how people remember” allows for analysis of the frictions that arise when Bronze Age conceptions of lineage and ancestors rub against a Confucian geneal-ogy without taking incompatible historical structures as givens.

This clarification leads to a positioning of archaeology’s intervention and contribution in chapter 2, “Death and Funerary Ritual: Where Multiple Time Frames Converge.” As colonial rule is often enacted through control over local marriage and funerary customs, the mortuary domain emerges as a distinctive space where the regulation of social reproduction and community relations is manifest and potentially contested. Gravesites, I argue, figure as “heterotopic” spaces, converging multiple prehistoric temporalities in one place. Local life-times, symbolic rites of passage, and the collective planning of rituals inter-sect to complicate the singular effects of state genealogy to simply define life and death. Focusing the analysis on funerary landscapes and how the Mimo remembered the dead, chapter 2 elaborates a new approach to examine the con-tinuous configuration of social relations in prehistoric space and time. By trac-ing how and when specific mortuary rituals are conducted across bodies and spaces, I analyze the durations and processes that incorporated the past with the present. If archaeologists are to identify material practices that endow the experience of time with different dispositions toward change and continuity, then it is just as important to be explicit about material pathways that generate and configure these relations. To that end, chapter 2 attends to the materiality of how people remember and introduces the analytical significance of concepts such as “mnemonics” and “heirlooms” in relating people’s sense of being in time. Chapter 2 also offers a general introduction to the material culture of Han funerary practices and is an instructive reference for those readers encounter-ing similar hybrid mortuary assemblages along frontier zones.

Applying this approach to the highlands, part II of the book examines the per-sons and the biographical and generational histories that worked to orient places of death and establish regional landscapes. Structured as explorations of three periods in the region’s autochthonous prehistory, chapters 3 and 4 trace the coor-dinated acts of burial and mourning that bound the living to the dead in the Early Bronze Age (ca. 900–500 bc) and the ways that ongoing interactions between descendants and ancestors prefigured conditions for the political time that we conventionally call the Classic Bronze Age (500–250 bc), the period examined in chapter 5. Titled “Time and Place in the Early Bronze Age,” chapter 3 identifies emergent territorial politics in projects of mound-building for the dead. Cycles of rebuilding and alignment along axial grids on valley floors indicate that these were not eponymous monuments but interconnected, yet unfinished, places where future social relations were envisioned by a progressive scaling up of mounds.



Introduction 21

These building projects, though generative of new horizons, also formed the basis on which different corporate groups seek to distinguish ancestral memories and control the production of generational time, in particular as certain Mimo fac-tions accrued wealth and prestige in tribal war. Chapter 4, “Bronze Kettledrums and Iconic Halberds: The Political Symbols of an Emerging Regional Tradition (650–500 bc),” shows how the rise of drum-owning chiefs, who foreshadowed the likes of the “king of Dian,” entailed processes of segmentation and class stratifica-tion, evoking what Leach (1954) and Friedman (1998) observed as modus operandi of highland political history. Drawing on later ethnohistorical and iconographic accounts of tribal chieftains, chapter 5, “A Southwest Political Time (500–250 bc),” relates the circulation of bronze drums and cowries in these mounds to a sys-tem of exchange that developed between highland and valley groups. Beyond an extension of social networks, local genealogical histories and wealth transmission became enmeshed in the history of these politico-economic tributary transac-tions. Two temporal frames are thus brought into play at death—a commitment to renewing local landscapes of mounds and the external tribal networks that elevate, mark, and perpetuate lineage stratification. Arguing against views of an endemically isolated topography, chapter 5 delineates, on the eve of Han conquest, an interconnected highland geography where concepts of space and time tran-scend their locality and are increasingly provisional to a regional politics centered in the heartland occupied by the “king of Dian.” Part II contrasts a view of zomia as a region without states with a study of institutionalized politics in prehistory.

Part III reprises the question of a waning Bronze Age past but reframes the question by situating the imperial rupture in relation to the two Bronze Age prec-edents of mound-building and drum possession. If tribal insurgencies persisted in the two centuries following Han conquest, the extent to which these spaces and practices were either suppressed or objectified as autochthonous traditions is per-tinent to an understanding of local subjectivities. How were memories reworked in imperial time and space by different individuals and lineages? To reconcile the confounding identities of drum-possessing chiefs and barbarian officials, of insurgents and state subjects, chapters 6 and 7 insert individuals buried with Han seals, names, and orthographies back into the prehistoric landscape. Chapter 6, “A Divided and Entagled Imperial Frontier,” shows the periodicity of mound renewal to be halting and infrequent following conquest, indicating that the Han relocation of communities detected in the settlement archaeology had impacted the cycles of funerary ritual. In spite of community fragmentation and the vio-lence of relocation, funerary landscapes, however vulnerable, were neither forgot-ten nor destroyed. Identified by Chinese seals and resplendent with metropolitan luxuries, barbarian interments across the region remain in these axially aligned spaces with inclusions of fragments recycled from bronze drums. Emulative and



22 Introduction

anachronistic at the same time, these acts reflect deliberations, on the one hand, by the living on their generational horizons and, on the other hand, the updat-ing of a marked and imperfect past carrying the momentum of prehistory into history. Turning my attention to how “natives” write, I also question whether the incorporation of scripts alters the Mimo’s and the Dian’s conception of history.

In the final chapter, “The D(eb)atability of the Past: The Past in the Imperial Present,” I attempt to decipher each seal’s epigraphy to arrive at names and identi-ties for these frontier actors. In contrast to historians who strive, with much dif-ficulty, to match these seals and places with recorded figures, my analysis reveals that most seals were fake, yet the names and designs they bear refer to chang-ing spatial-temporal politics. The titles, more than statuses iconic of state order, responded to the changing imperial edicts that regulated barbarian identities and their place within the imperial hierarchy. How individuals selected and copied titles—from among the range of king, marquis, assistant, magistrate—spoke not to aspirations but specific calculations timed to coincide with policies of the imperial center. Depending on the moment, the same title could evoke legitimaty or violate imperial mandates. The practice of writing thus confounds Han sov-ereignty while employing its terms. This alternative decipherment also reveals how, through inscribing figures into prehistoric spaces, preexisting genealogies grounded territorial claims and insurgent forms of political action.



ancient highlands of southwest china

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