Politics of food,feasting,and sacrifice in the Chinese Bronze Age: Quantitative analysis of pottery at Yanshi Shangcheng.
详细信息
文摘
This dissertation examines the role of food, feasting, and sacrifice in the generation of social inequality at the early Shang dynasty site of Yanshi Shangcheng by examining the remains of food practices, including the organic residues in pottery and the pottery deposited in ritual and domestic contexts. The Chinese Bronze Age was a period of early state formation, a time of factional competition among polities and burgeoning of material culture revolving around elite ritual practice. Social inequality, which was rooted in earlier Neolithic times, increased over the course of the Shang dynasty culminating around at the Late Shang capital site of Yinxu as evidenced by the mortuary remains displaying extensive human sacrifice and massive elite tombs with lavish furnishings. Four hundred years earlier at the beginning of the dynasty, Shang social stratification was at an earlier stage of development. The inscriptional record and texts from the early historic period indicate that one of the priorities of the Shang elite was to perform sacrificial offerings to their ancestors, hosting them in ritual feasts that involved the sacrifice of animals, the consumption of sacrificial food, and the use of elaborate bronze food vessels. A large ritual deposit at the Early Shang site of Yanshi Shangcheng, occupied from ca. 1600--1365 BC, appears to be the remains of a temple site where such rituals would have taken place. This deposit, located inside the Yanshi Palace displays the remains of intensive and continuous sacrificial activity. Pottery from this deposit was compared with pottery deposited in pits in a lower status residential area in the northeast sector of the site known as Area IV. Both pottery assemblages date to the second phase of occupation (Yanshi Phase II), which was a period of flourishing of the settlement. Quantitative analysis of pottery included both typological and fabric analysis involving various numerical and statistical techniques. Results indicated that the types of pots deposited in the temple site were larger and more diverse that those found in Area IV. There were also types appropriate for serving, transport, and storage rather than cooking and a number of unique types pointing to a more elaborate cuisine. Pots deposited in Area IV pits, by contrast, were more suitable for cooking, especially steaming, and the service of smaller groups of people. Through contextual analysis, these results were interpreted as representing feasting in the temple site and more modest cooking in Area IV. The Area IV assemblage also included pottery jue vessels, which were absent in the Palace. This was interpreted as evidence of emulation or minoring of the elite practice of using jue in rituals for drinking or libation. Thus although historical and archaeological narratives tend to portray the elite as stewards of ancestor ritual, it is quite possible that people from Area IV were practicing ritual offerings in their domestic setting. With regard to quality and aesthetics, pottery from the Palace was harder and lighter in color, indicating developments in firing technology in this domain. These developments appear related to further developments of firing temperature throughout the Shang indicating a bifurcation of knowledge and technology into an elite domain and a more common domain tied to earlier tradition. The more subtle changes in outward appearance of pottery used in the Palace did not detract from the general appearance, which was still similar enough to that of Area IV (gray and much of it cord-marked) to indicate a common "Shang" identity between both domains. This appeal to tradition may have been useful at stabilizing the state during a time of increasing political instability. A shift in sacrificial activities occurred in the final stage of occupation at Yanshi involving a diversification of the types of animals sacrificed, the introduction or intensification of human sacrifice, and a shift in location to a more open setting. This change paralleled or heralded the abandonment of the site suggesting a close relationship between ritual and power. The introduction of sacrifice of a greater variety of animals would need to be analyzed carefully in context but it is clear that there was a greater display of power, perhaps in the face of political instability that ultimately led to abandonment of the settlement. Careful further contextual analysis of ritual and domestic deposits at Yanshi will be necessary to clarify questions surrounding pottery deposition, such as whether the elite were consuming the sacrificial foods inside the temple (or whether offerings were made only ancestor consumption) and whether people of lower status may have been practicing ritual offering in domestic settings.