The Yueshi Culture, the Dong Yi, and the archaeology of ethnicity in Early Bronze Age China

This first work on the Yueshi Culture (which was centered in Shandong ca. 1800–1450 BC) in a Western language provides a discussion of previous research, basic characteristics, and the process of defining this culture. Primary data (ceramics) from the Panmiao and Shantaisi site excavations in Shangqiu, Henan, provide evidence for the local development of the Yueshi Culture and for its continuation into the Upper Erligang period: this runs counter to common replacement models.; The Yueshi Culture was contemporaneous with the Erlitou and the so-called “Proto-Shang” Cultures of the Central Plains. In the Chinese culture-historical approach, these archaeological cultures are taken as representative of well-bounded social groups and are seen as equivalent to the historically-known Dong Yi, Xia, and predynastic Shang. Such equivalencies are highly problematic. Ethnicity theory shows us that the relationship between social identity and culture is much more complex and ambiguous: social boundaries do not enclose discontinuous units of culture, and alternative approaches to the archaeological culture are necessary to derive identity.; It is also argued here that when the historical evidence for the Dong Yi are considered in the light of social identity theory, the salience of a “Dong Yi” identity during the Shang period cannot be supported. A Dong Yi identity might have emerged as a reaction to the Western Zhou dynasty's new conception of the central place in the socio-political order of a culturally integrated Zhou “Us” whose identity was maintained through opposition to an outside “Them,” who in the east were the Dong Yi.; Based on the equivalence drawn between the Yueshi Culture and the Dong Yi, a common argument maintains that the Shang cannot be found where the Dong Yi were located and thus excludes the origins of the Shang dynasty from the eastern Henan region. Since the archaeological culture is not a direct reflection of identity and because a “Doug Yi” identity did not exist in the Shang period, the possibility of Shang origins in the east remains open.