Search

The Bronze Age of northern Eurasia is characterised by major socio-economic changes. A secondary products revolution defined an overall trajectory in these global economic transformations. Innovative changes in fibre technologies led to the appearance of woven wool textiles and the production and consumption of new types of garment. Analysis of the first direct AMS 14C dates from woven wool fibres from Bronze Age sites across northern Eurasia allow us to define key stages in the directional spread of woven wool textiles and to determine the cultural context of this process of technological transmission.

The ‘Monumental Myopia’ project uses multiscalar remote-sensing techniques to identify potential prehistoric nomadic settlements in the Siberian landscape. Eschewing the monumental burial mounds, the project aims to explore the everyday life of pastoral societies in the first millennium BC.

Copyright © 2016 Antiquity Publications Ltd. Where did pottery first appear in the Old World? Statistical modelling of radiocarbon dates suggests that ceramic vessel technology had independent origins in two different hunter-gatherer societies. Regression models were used to estimate average rates of spread and geographic dispersal of the new technology. The models confirm independent origins in East Asia (c. 16000 cal BP) and North Africa (c. 12000 cal BP). The North African tradition may have later influenced the emergence of Near Eastern pottery, which then flowed west into Mediterranean Europe as part of a Western Neolithic, closely associated with the uptake of farming.

Academic interest in the elaborate bead assemblages recovered from graves of the Western Zhou elite has grown in recent years. Beads and beaded ornaments have been seen as both markers of external contact and evidence of change in the Zhou ritual system. Recent study of these bead assemblages, however, indicates that they may also have reflected shifting political circumstances. The use of different bead materials and forms suggests a trend to centralised production and control of manufacture, particularly from the later tenth century BC. The authors correlate a move towards readily manufactured materials with evidence for widespread elite intermarriage, and consider a possible tension between production and the socio-political strategies of the Zhou court.

In recent years, several research groups have concluded that traditional ‘provenance studies’ of metals, in which an object is linearly related to a single source, do not represent the reality of many archaeological assemblages. This paper sets out a new systematic approach to metal chemistry designed to characterize, using trace elements and isotopes in an assemblage of material, the underlying circulation of metal. When applied in China to the use of leaded tin bronze to cast the large and numerous ritual vessels of the Shang (c. 1500-1045 BC) and the Zhou dynasties (c. 1045-771 BC), the methodology reveals the complexity of the copper sources on which the major late Shang capital at Anyang depended for its bronze workshops. This has been recognised by many in the past, but has yet to prompt a full reassessment of the organisation of the Shang bronze industry. Here we point out the possibility of a need to transport copper from distant regions in the south, on the Yangzi, and even from far to the north, in northeast China. Using lead isotope data, presented in a new format, we attempt to enlarge the understanding of this organisation, demonstrating that, while the Zhou took over some of the range of copper available to the middle Anyang period, the lead sources exploited in early and middle Anyang phases differed from those taken up by the Zhou. The methodology enables a further understanding of the network on which the major dynasties depended for supplies of copper, lead and tin, and can thus lead us towards one of the major objectives of the new interpretational system - to give equal weight to archaeological and chemical data.

© The Prehistoric Society 2017 This paper provides a contextual summary of a diachronic analysis of ceramic vessels and hunter-gatherer societies from the final Pleistocene to the later Holocene in a remote corner of the Vitim Basin in Eastern Siberia. An integrated programme of ceramic analysis, raw materials survey, and archaeological investigation is drawn into new models of group mobility and social behaviour. The results challenge widespread assumptions about the relationship between ceramics, sedentarisation, and social complexity. Evidence of these transformations, though potentially identifiable in the archaeological record, could not be associated with the adoption of pottery.

This paper presents the initial results of a new phase of absolute dating at Ust'-Karenga. Three Optically-Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dates were obtained on quartz grains extracted from Ust'-Karenga type ceramic sherds from Layers 4, 6 and 7 at Ust'-Karenga XII. These dates are used to test the reliability of the existing radiocarbon sequence and evaluate counter claims that sought to reject early dates for ceramics in the Transbaikal on the basis of a putative carbon cycle anomaly in the Transbaikal region. Our results strongly uphold the excavator's original interpretation of the site and independently confirm both the Late Pleistocene age and the long duration of the Ust'-Karenga pottery phase. The paper demonstrates the value of using independent absolute dating methods to test contested radiocarbon chronologies.

The primary aim of this paper is to track the history of quantitative chemical analysis on Chinese copper-based metal objects and suggest a future outlook. The beginnings of this subject can be traced to the 1770s. Its overall history can be divided into five stages. By considering the different interpretational contexts in each of these stages, we show that all have made a significant contribution to our knowledge of the chemistry of copper alloy objects in China, and in broader terms to understanding the archaeology of China. Thanks to the sustained efforts of our predecessors, a substantial database of chemical and isotopic information has been created for present scholars, which we summarize here. We suggest, however, that this database contains a great deal of invaluable information which has yet to be fully explored. Moreover, given the scale of the Bronze Age in China, we also suggest that there is a great deal of more analytical work required before we can truly interpret the role of metal in Bronze Age Chinese society. This historical review also suggests that dialogue between related disciplines is a crucial factor in this area, and one which is vital in capitalizing the work already achieved.

In the article by Pollard et al. (2017), Figure 2 was incorrectly duplicated as Figure 5.