The Burial Record of Prehistoric Liangshan in Southwest China: Graves as Composite Objects by Anke Hein (review)

In The Burial Record of Prehistoric Liangshan in Southwest China, Anke Hein takes a methodical, inductive approach to examining a body of data scrupulously gathered from Chinese archaeological reports, atlases, local chronicles (see table B.3, p. 414), and her field research in various locations, including Chengdu 成都, Liangshan 涼山, Huili 會理, and Yunnan 雲 南, where she collected primary data on 41 sites. The study is a laborious and commendable undertaking of archaeological scholarship. Hein confronted issues that trouble many in western academia who work in China, including disjointed, unverifiable data, and the demanding logistics of data collection. She adopts a twofold model aimed to contextualize the interconnections of environment and human behavior while mitigating the biases of a fragmentary and uneven corpus of source material. It is a thorough piece of basic research that uplifts current and future archaeological studies of southwest China, but as it stands, the analysis is so overwrought that the results cannot be easily referenced or replicated, especially under the adopted theoretical constructs.

The data in question pertain to 213 sites, amounting to 1059 graves (p. 38), from the hilly Liangshan 涼山 region of the southern bounds of Sichuan 四川 Province. This region consists of the prefecture-level city of Panzhihua 攀枝花, the counties of Luquan 祿勸, Ninglang 寧蒗, and Yongsheng 永勝 in northwest Yunnan, and Liangshan Yizu Zizhizhou 涼山彜族自治州 (Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture) (p. 44). It is situated between the Daliangshan 大涼山 (Daliang Mountains) in eastern Liangshan Prefecture and the eastern terminus of the Tibetan Plateau that broadly extends from the Qionglai 邛崃 range in northern Sichuan to Anninghe liuyu 安寧河流域 (Anning River Valley) in the south, the geographical center of the study. Described by the author as "an intersection point of several cultural-geographic regions" (p. 1), Liangshan's diverse topography lends itself to tracing spatial patterns of confluence and diffusion in the prehistory of human-environment interaction. However, such research prospects have been masked by a checkered history of fieldwork since the 1980s (pp. 35–37). Excavations were unsystematic and in most places deterred by rugged and restrictive terrain. Chronology is stereotypically typology-reliant with few supporting radiocarbon dates. Hein's study determinedly sets out to address these shortcomings for the period from the early Bronze Age (mid-second millennium b.c.e.) through Eastern Han (early third century c.e.) (table 7.14, p. 267).

This monograph was developed from Hein's (2013) doctoral research and inherits the structure of her dissertation (reviewed by Brunson 2014). The nine adopted chapters are grouped into three phases of analysis (outlined below). The book is not the sole output of Hein's research on Liangshan, however. Hein specializes in the prehistoric material records of today's Sichuan 四川 and Yunnan provinces. Research for the book evolved in tandem with her other studies in these regions that have appeared, to date, in over a dozen English and Chinese journal articles and book chapters. These include international collaborative projects in the contiguous Chengdu Plain and Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture 阿壩藏族羌族自治州 that engage broader questions about prehistoric anthropogenic activities arising from interactions between Tibetan Plateau and its surrounding regions (d'Alpoim Guedes and Hein 2018; d'Alpoim Guedes et al. 2015). Hein's book draws on these broader scale patterns that have since brought to light the importance of Liangshan and southwest China to the field of Chinese prehistoric archaeology.

The body of the book has three parts: Part I, "The Model and the Material;" Part II, "Applying the Model;" and Part III, "Evaluating the Model and the Data." Part II contains the main data analysis. In Part I, Hein expounds the models and details the climate and physical geography of Liangshan apropos of habitats for settlement, subsistence practices, and burial activities. She draws on this environmental context in Part III...