The Chinese Neolithic: Trajectories to Early States (review)

The archaeological summary of a major region is a difficult genre-practically doomed to failure from the outset because regional experts will find inadequate attention to their own favorite sites or will disagree with the overall perspective adopted by the author, and because outsiders, for whom such books are presumably written, will almost certainly go away feeling confused by a welter of unfamiliar details and either lacking a coherent synthetic view or suspecting that the one they have gained is a filter through which only selected information has passed. Part of the problem is that, both as authors and readers, we tend to take too broad a goal for regional summaries; they really should not try to be all things to all people. It is thus a delight to report that, despite what the title might imply, Li Liu has not here attempted to summarize The Chinese Neolithic. The book's subtitle is the key; instead of a summary of "the archaeology" of the Neolithic in China, this book is actually an incisive and analytical comparative study of state origins, focusing on the antecedents to the first states in the middle and lower Yellow River valley. As such, the book has a clear objective and a well-defined point of view; it has a great deal to say, to several audiences, including experts in Chinese archaeology, specialists in other aspects of China studies, and those interested in complex society origins in any part of the world. Much of Liu's previous work revolves around the subject of early complex societies in China, and some of that work reappears here, along with new additions to it, all of which is in a more synthetic context.

The focus is on the Longshan culture, spanning the time between about 3500 and 2500 B.C.-a period during which a number of different societies or polities with relatively complex organization existed in a vast area some 1600 km across. Liu characterizes these societies as "chiefdoms," a usage that is certain to raise the hackles of some archaeologists, who will fail to realize that this does not imply that these societies were organized just like Hawaiian chiefdoms right before European contact. Rather, this label quickly puts the subject of the book into a global comparative context alongside societies of very roughly similar scales and levels of complexity. We realize we are talking about societies in the realm of the Mesoamerican Olmec, the North American Mississippian, or the European late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, for example, not Incas, Aztecs, Babylonians, or Middle Kingdom Egyptians. This is an extremely useful characterization, and in defiance of the supposed typological straight-jacket of such evolutionary terms, Liu sets right to work reconstructing not only the features of social, political, and economic organization Longshan societies shared (with each other and/or with chiefdoms elsewhere in the world) but also the differences between Longshan societies and other chiefdoms, and the considerable amount of organizational variation to be observed among Longshan societies themselves.

The volume begins with two introductory chapters: the first is largely theoretical and deals with a series of thorny conceptual, historical, and definitional matters, whereas the second concerns environmental reconstruction for the Longshan period. The next three chapters discuss "Household Subsistence and Ritual," "Spatial Organization and Social Relations in Communities," and "Community Burial Patterns" for Longshan and earlier periods. Chapter 6 takes up "The Development and Decline of Complex Societies in the Central Plains," with a heavy emphasis on settlement patterns at the regional scale, and chapter 7 does the same for the eastern and western parts of the Longshan culture area, down and up the Yellow River, respectively, from the Central Plains. Chapter 8 deals with the emergence of the Erlitou state from its Longshan antecedents, and the final chapter summarizes what has been learned and calls for further research.

As a comparative study of the societies that led up to and eventually produced what...