Archaeological Research On Passes Of Qi State Region During Eastern Zhou Period

Passes are artificial buildings which are set up by utilizing the natural terrain. And in the ancient time, the rulers established institutions there to make sure that they were in normal running. The passes played impotent roles during ancient time of China. As the military defense, the passes were of strong practical functions. In addition, they still had functions at the external communication, trade activities, and other political or economic activities. With the deepening of archaeological survey and excavations at the passes, and more and more excavated documents coming out, more and more scholars begin to focus their eyes on this special remains. The research of passes is of very impotent meanings. However, because of the lack of history documents and the archaeological materials, the academia does not focus on the study of Pre-Qin passes. According to this situation, this paper makes the analysis of Qi-state passes during Eastern Zhou period based on the interrelated studies. The research methods of this paper are the archaeological approach and the historical geology methods. I wish that it can draw more attention on this task.This paper has five chapters. The first one is introduction. In this part, we talk about the concept and the origin of the passes, and talk about the meaning of this task and the research status. We also introduce the text structure of this paper. The second chapter is about the traffic and the general overview of Qi-state passes. We introduce the main traffic lines in Qi state. Then it describes the general situation of Qi state passes. From the point of geographical location, the architecture of passes, the "Inner passes"and the "frontier passes", the paper classifies the passes of Qi state. The third chapter focuses on their military functions. Based on four aspects, such as the military defense of passes, the distributions of arsenals, the military defense of arsenals, and the relevance between passes and arsenals, this article describes the defence system of Qi state. The fourth chapter mainly discusses the relationship between passes and trade activities. The passes played a role in taxing, and, sometimes, they worked as markets during Eastern Zhou period. From the inscriptions on pottery and the seals, we can tell some market places. Based on thees places and the distributions of knife-shaped coins of Qi, we have a overview of commercial district in Qi state. Then the paper analyze the relevance between the passes and the commercial district. The last part is epilogue summarizing the article. And I evaluated my paper and mainly pointed out the shortcomings.