Identity, culture and social change in ancient Sichuan, China

During the past two decades archaeological research in China has been enriched by greater contributions from regional studies. This trend has been encouraged by several extraordinary archaeological discoveries made in provincial regions, including Sichuan province in southwest China.

Identity, culture and social change in ancient Sichuan, China Luisa Elena Mengoni During the past two decades archaeological research in China has been enriched by greater contributions fr om regional stud ies.This trend has been encouraged by several extraordinary archaeological discoveries made in provincial regions, includ ing Sichuan province in southwest China.
T he study of regional cultures is today an increasingly active field of archaeological research in China, supported by both the central government and local institutions.This new trend has developed in the past twenty years following dra matic discoveries made in provinces not previously prioritized in the national research agenda, and also major changes in the administrative structure and allocation of resources after the introduction of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms in 1979.1 The decrease of centralized political con trol over local administrations, and the subsequent autonomy enjoyed by local institutes of archaeology over the choice of excavations and the management of local resources, have led to a rapid increase of regional archaeological projects, especially in the most economically developed prov inces.Sichuan province and Chongqing municipality in southwest China (Fig. 1) are good examples of this trend.2 In Sichuan the discovery of several major archaeological sites has dramatically changed our understanding of Neolithic and Western Han (206-8 BC).especially if excavated from funerary contexts, has thus generally been grouped and interpreted under the labels Ba culture, Shu culture or Ba-Shu culture, and these terms have had quite strong cultural and ethnic conno tations.Specific fu nerary practices have been ascribed to each culture and its sup posed people, thus creating quite fictional boundaries within archaeological assem blages.Such interpretation has also been encouraged by the peculiarity of some types of burials and grave goods found exclusively in the region, such as boat shape coffins made out of tree trunks, or bronze weapons decorated with a great variety of distinctive zoomorphic (animal shape) motifs and mysterious symbols.The spectacular discovery in Chengdu city in 2000 of a large grave containing 17 wooden boat-shape coffins (Fig. 2),8 which was dated to the fifth-fourth century BC, early in the period of the Warring States, has further intensified the current debate on identity, culture and ethnicity in the region, especially in relation to the Bronze Age.
On the other hand, in recent studies of ancient Sichuan, archaeologists have been trying to define chronological sequences that are based on typological classifica tions of newly excavated material from settlements,9 labelled with the names of the most representative sites.These stud ies mark an important step forward in the archaeology of the region and they have helped to free archaeological interpreta tion from the constraints ofthe written evi dence.However, this approach has been more readily adopted for Neolithic peri ods, which lack written evidence, than for the Bronze Age.The existence of historical texts from the Bronze Age, despite their sparse and fragmentary nature, has tended to skew the interpretation of archaeologi cal materials towards the identification of past states and peoples mentioned in them, as is true of the funerary remains of the late Bronze Age that have been attributed to the broadly defined Ba-Shu culture.

Identity and social change
Funerary remains constitute a distinct type of material culture in the way that they embody a complex of symbolic asso ciations and social relations, only part of which is visible to us in material form.Although we cannot draw a direct link between funerary remains and past social realities, mortuary contexts can neverthe less convey information on group identi ties and social relationships.The high variability of fu nerary practices at local and regional levels that characterized late Bronze Age Sichuan cannot be explained only by reference to broad cultural differ ences; it needs to be more specifically explained in relation to the complex social context of the period.We know from the sparse written sources that, between the fifth and the second century BC, the area of ancient Sichuan underwent profound political and social changes -military campaigns, migrations, transfers of peo ple, and economic reforms.These events affected the existing social composition and internal stratification of the local com munities, and had different implications according to the types of area (urban cen tres or peripheral areas) and the social agents (local or non-local elites, soldiers, immigrants and others) involved.The high level of social mobility at that time proba bly affected how people redefined their own identities, as individuals and as groups as well as in their material culture.
Research I have carried out on the funerary remains of ancient Sichuan, in particular burial types and certain classes of items and decorative motifs, had the specific aims of identifying group identities within the larger cultural groups mentioned in the written sources, and of exploring how local and imported funerary practices were acquired and transformed over time, as evidence of social changes and inter action.10

Funerary remains of the Chengdu Plain
One of the areas I investigated was the Chengdu Plain where variations in funer ary practices between the fifth and second century BC, and before and after the Qin conquest in 316 BC, clearly suggest a com plex and changing social landscape within both urban and peripheral communities.Some elite burials of the Chengdu Plain (dated to the fifth-fourth century BC) con tain boat coffins with different quantities and combinations of local and imported items, such as local round-base pottery vessels, weapons with stylized and zoo morphic motifs, and imported bronze vessels produced in ancient workshops in the provinces of Hubei and Shanxi.In some cases, for example at the site of Shangyejie in Chengdu city and at the bur ial sites in the towns of Mianzhu 1 1 and Xindu 12 (see Fig. 1), the graves are clearly those of members of the highest aristoc racy, who had privileged access to a large variety of products, particularly the most refined and exclusive items (Fig. 3) pro duced in areas outside the Chengdu Plain, such as the region occupied by the Chu kingdom in modern Hubei province.In other cases, such as Baihuatan13 and other similar burials in Chengdu city (dated to the fourth-third century BC), the predom inance of weapons decorated either with local zoomorphic designs or with stylized motifs inspired by archaic patterns used on  similar weapons of the Western Zhou dynasty (1050-771 BC) from Henan (Fig. 4), together with a smaller number of imported vessels, seems to suggest that the burials also belonged to members of the elite, but of a somewhat lower rank and probably connected more with the exer cise of a military power.Finally, in another group of burials of the same period in Chengdu city, the grave goods consist mainly of bronze weapons and vessels of local production, with no imported items.The weapons found in these burials are all decorated with local zoomorphic designs (Fig. 5) and suggest a well defined identity shared by the members of this high-rank group, probably linked to the military class and expressing their affiliation through repetitive sets of symbols and decorative motifs.
In the period between the third and the second century BC, a general trend towards the acquisition of non-local practices is evident both in types of burial and in grave goods.Wooden encasements with or with out inner coffins, known as guo burials, and simple rectangular pits became the most widespread type of burial, while boat coffins gradually disappeared.The items found in some burials of high rank show a marked distance fr om local traditions, as at the burial site of Fenghuangshan in Chengdu city dated to the late second cen tury BC (Fig. 6),14 where the grave goods are mainly flat-base pottery jars and lacquer objects.Other burials contain unusual features, such as the bronze weapons with zoomorphic motifs in a tomb made of wooden axes found in Guangrongxiao, also in Chengdu city.These burials may have belonged to high military or imperial officials connected with the installation of the new Qin administration.Cemeteries excavated at other sites, for example at Longquanyi at the southeastern edge of Chengdu city/5 show instead the rise of new communities, probably immigrants and soldiers from Shaanxi transferred under Qin law.Here the burials contain a completely different set of grave goods: they are all guo burials or simple shafts containing flat-base jars, simple lacquered items and very sparse weapons with no decoration.

The cemetery of Shifang
A different development of funerary prac tices is represented by the cemetery of Shifang, north of Chengdu city (see Fig. 1).16It dates from the fifth to the third cen tury BC and contains 53 burials, mainly boat coffins and simple shafts, with only a few guo burials.The distinctive character istic of this site is that all the grave goods found in the 44 burials that date from the fifth to the third century BC are locally made and show very few variations over this long period of time.At the site there is no evidence of imported items, as there is in the high-rank burials of the Chengdu Plain (Mianzhu, Xindu) or in Chengdu city (Baihuatan) , and none of the boat-coffin burials is comparable in size and scale to those in the cemetery of Shangyejie in Chengdu, dated to the fi fth to fourth cen tury BC.The cemetery of Shifang probably belonged to a quite homogeneous commu nity that shared a strong sense of group identity.Nevertheless, internal variations in the quantity of grave goods and in the typology of burials suggest the existence of vertical differentiations in status or rank, and horizontal divisions that are probably due to the affiliation of the deceased to spe cific military groups or to differences of gender.Evidently, high-rank members of this community did not have the same privileged access to imported items as is apparent at other sites in the Chengdu Plain or in the city, and their status was mainly expressed by the quantity and vari ety ofrichly decorated bronze weapons.At the site there is evidence of more than one elite group.Only at a later date, in the third-second century BC, does a marked change appear in the choice of grave goods, which are clearly distant from the local tradition: guo burials and rectangular pits become the most common type of inter ment and the weapons do not bear any zoomorphic designs.It is highly probable that this change occurred during the third century BC after the troops of the Qin emperor occupied Sichuan.

Conclusion
The variations in funerary practices evi dent at sites in the city and plain of Chengdu, and their distinctive local devel opments as exemplified by the Shifang cemetery, show how the ways in which the Fig ure 2 Part of the burial site of Shangyejie in Ch engdu city showing the excavated boat coffins made fr om tree trunks.

Fi gure 6
Section and plan of a guo burial composed of a wooden encasement divided into internal sections, Fenguang shan, Ch engdu city (after Kaogu 5, 418, Fig .1, 1991].
An increasing number of detailed archae ological reports are now being published in China as monographs and in major aca demic journals; see also the catalogues edited by R. Bagley, Ancient Sich uan: treasures fr om a lost civilization (Seattle and Princeton: Seattle Art Museum and Princeton University Press, 2001) and by A. Thote, Ch ine, l'enigme de l'homme de bronze (Paris: Editions Findakli, 2003).Introduction to the bronze cultures of the Sichuan basin") in Sich uan pendi de Qintong Shidai ("The Bronze