Taosi Theory And Cultural Studies Prehistoric Social Complexity

According to the field work and study on historical documents, the Taosi Culture(Simplified Chinese:陶寺文化) in Southern Shanxi Province is a truly important lateLongshan Period (Simplified Chinese:龙山时代) archaeological culture for the studyon the internal mechanism of the origins of ancient Chinese Civilization and earlyhistory of complex societies in East Asia.In terms of the discourse structure, the first studying object is the theory of socialcomplication, which could be observed from the two perspectives: specialization andhierarchization, and related discussion is shown in Introduction, and then thecomparative research into various interpretive schemes from Lewis H. Morgan to theNeoevolutionism School after the World War II, including Elman R. Service, Robert L.Carneiro, Timothy K. Earle, etc., constitutes Chapter One, Two and Three, and the lastone is assigned to the issue of chiefdom. Deservedly, the neoevolutionism andchiefdom are the focus questions of this paper, especially the latter. And for theintellectual history of chiefdom period, quite apart from the intergenerationaldifferences between anthropologists and archaeologists, many other integral subjectsof the chiefdom society itself have been discussed in Chapter Three, such as therelationship between economy and the early caste system, inheritance system andkinship structure, the essence of the power in prestate stage and its operating mode,simple chiefdoms and complex chiefdoms, group-oriented chiefdoms andindividualizing chiefdoms, staple finance and wealth finance, war and thedevelopment of the scale of societies under certain of polity like chiefdom, and theforms of ideology of that age, etc. In particular, the hypothesis, two ways of the stateevolution, designed by Shen Changyun (Simplified Chinese:沈长云) is refuted inthis section.The next section is empirical study and the aim is to combine the internationaltheory with Chinese archaeological materials. First, in Chapter Four, the researchcourse and progression of Taosi Culture is reviewed, and on this basis, three stages ofthe academic history are divided, which is profoundly affected by contemporary fieldwork. Generally, new technology and new theory such as settlement archaeology and archaeoastronomy are substituting and reforming the traditional interpretative schemelike the dual attestation (Simplified Chinese:二重证据法). In more concrete terms,various issues of current domestic study in this field are thoroughly discussed here,such as how to evaluate the true social and political significance of ancient publicworks, the diversity of early Li system (Simplified Chinese:礼制), the relationshipbetween personal economic success and his political status, the exact sociologicalmeanings of these words like Datong Society (Simplified Chinese:大同社会), Yaoand Shun Period (Simplified Chinese:尧舜时代) and the Taosi Culture, theapplication of world-system theory in North China archaeology, and the changingpattern of settlement development while societies evolving from chiefdom to state,etc.And then, after the theoretical discussion and review of the Taosi research, it isthe right time to express the viewpoint of this paper on the growth of the complexityof Taosi Culture, which is the third relatively independent part of the currentinterpretative system. According to the classical evolution theory and neoevolutionism,the economy, especially the form of division and cooperation in the actualmanufacturing process, is the true basis of the whole superstructure in one society,and the nature of political system is just the allocation mechanism for social products,in other words, the politics reflected by the ideological system is a reflection of theeconomic structures in principle, which is the key to understand the growth processmentioned above. From this historical materialism perspective, a new and vividtrajectory of the Taosi complex society is able to be sketched out as below: Taosi is ahighly complicated society throughout the three phases divided by archaeologists, andthe most plausible explanation for the growth of social complexity during the severalcenturies, according to the current archaeological materials, should be the increase inpopulation, especially affected by the continuing immigration from the outside ofLinfen Basin (Simplified Chinese:临汾盆地), because more products is thefoundation of the more complex political structure, and in light of the actual level ofenergy exploitation and utilization in Longshan Period, more products inevitablymean extra and stable labor input, and the details of final outcome of this society isstill unclear. And as for fully detailed account, please refer to Chapter Five.