Climate change and Zhou relocations in early Chinese history

In Chinese history, the development of the Zhou tribes and the dynasties that succeeded them between 3550 and 2200 BP in the middle reaches of the Yellow River is known as the period of ‘Five Relocations’. Most of these relocations appear to have been forced by the pressure of nomadic invasions and occupations from the northern steppe. Historians simply attributed these relocations to political and military causes. However, palaeoclimatic studies show that the Zhou tribes and their successor dynasties developed at the demise of the Holocene Climatic Optimum when regional climate became highly variable and unstable. An integrated analysis of environmental change over the Loess Plateau and the Mongolian steppe facilitates a credible understanding of the linkage between climatic events and these relocations. It indicates that the relocations caused an expansion or contraction of the settled regions over the drought-prone semi-arid lands. During climatic amelioration, dry farming societies pushed upward to the Loess Plateau where increased precipitation and soil moisture allowed cereals to be cultivated. When hit by droughts and the associated disasters, both the dry farming societies and the nomadic tribes had to move southward to find an environment suitable for their food production. Migration and relocation were, therefore, basic strategies to secure the resources necessary to sustain an agricultural economy. The settled frontier was pulled back as dry farming societies from the upland plateau retreated to the lowland riverbanks of the Guanzhong Basin. Even though there were political and military intentions, climatic events played an essential role in the relocations of the Zhou tribes and the successive dynasties.     

Tool hoards and Neolithic use of the landscape in north-eastern Ireland

Summary. Archaeologists frequently suggest that the Neolithic occupants of Ireland and Britain may not have been fully settled farmers, but were, instead, at least partially nomadic pastoralists. However, human use of any landscape is more complex than the current debate suggests, and this debate has included few systematic studies designed to evaluate this issue in detail. This paper examines hoards (or ‘caches’) of flaked stone tools in County Antrim, Ireland, to consider the links between anticipatory tool storage and human land‐use patterns. Our data imply regular human movements over the study area, possibly linked to transhumant use of different altitudinal zones, with functionally and, sometimes, technologically specific classes of tools stored in different areas. However, the larger context of data on the Irish Neolithic clearly indicates that these movements were part of a way of life centred on permanent horticultural homesteads.     

气候变迁和中国历史

本文联系东亚、欧州和北美气候变迁及其影响 ,论述中国各历史时期气候变迁和历史的关系。指出以农为本的中国 ,尤其是北方 ,在气候变化面前显得格外脆弱。气候变化影响农业 ,从而影响社会各方面。从新石器时代至清朝 ,中国气候温暖期与寒冷期周期性变化的过程 ,是游牧文明与农耕文明两种生态环境较量与整合的过程。在温暖期 ,中国经济繁荣 ,民族统一 ,国家昌盛 ;寒冷期 ,气候剧变引起经济衰退 ,游牧民族南侵 ,农民起义 ,国家分裂 ,经济文化中心南移等。最后 ,作者指出 ,在历史时期 ,气候是中国北方政治命运的决定性因素之一 ,并强调将世界气候作为一个整体研究历史事件的重要性     

Sovereignty,mobility, and political cartographies in Late Bronze Age southern Caucasia

This article draws on archaeological data from Late Bronze Age (LBA, ca. 1550–1150 BC) fortress, shrine, cemetery, and residential sites in Armenia to challenge long-held assumptions about the potential for mobile-pastoral groups to develop and sustain complex polities. The past two decades of research by Project ArAGATS (the Armenian–American collaboration for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies) has demonstrated that LBA sovereignty emerged not through the sociopolitical coalescence of settled farming villages, but through the actions of hierarchically organized, mobile pastoralists. Post-processual archaeology helped focus discussions of ancient political life on the contingent nature of authority and the processes through which competing factions and stakeholders achieve political association. However, centuries of interpretive marginalization of nomadic peoples combined with deterministic notions regarding subsistence and settlement practices of mobile pastoralists have, until recently, hindered a broader anthropological consideration of the potential pathways to sovereignty available to more mobile societies. Drawing on a range of datasets from LBA fortresses, shrines, cemeteries, and ephemeral residential complexes, our study examines the essential factors contributing to the emergence and maintenance of complex polities among mobile pastoralists in the southern Caucasus, societies that were intimately associated—politically, economically, and ritually—with hill-top fortresses. This study of political association in LBA Armenia sheds light on the internal politics of nomadic communities and offers a unique opportunity to bring the South Caucasus into the comparitive study of ancient complex polities.     

唐代气候变化与唐代历史兴衰

本文支持唐代是一个温暖湿润的时期。温暖湿润的气候使唐代农牧业界线北移,农耕区扩大;农业经济作物种植北线北移,复种指数提高,产出的多样性更明显;农作物单产量提高,粮食总产量也提高;水利建设成效显著。由于国力强盛,使南方地区的开发有了保证。气候的温暖湿润为唐代农业经济的发展创造了条件,农业经济的发展为社会经济的整体发展和繁荣奠定了基础。本文赞同８世纪中叶气候有一个由暖转冷过程的观点,认为８世纪中叶的气候转寒造成了中国北方游牧民族南下压力增大,北方游牧民族纷纷入主中国北方建立区域性王朝,安史之乱是这个南下进程开始的标志性事件。经过南宋１２世纪的再一次寒冷突变后,北方游牧民族则开始了入主中原建立大一统王朝的历史。     

欧亚草原东部的考古发现与斯基泰的早期历史文化

新疆的考古材料对探讨斯基泰的来源和早期斯基泰文化同欧亚草原东部地区的关系等问题有重要意义。新疆及其周边地区在斯基泰西迁之前已经和丰提克地区有互动关系,三道海子文化在其中起了主要作用,其扩张也是斯基泰西迁的主要原因。斯基泰西迁后,欧亚草原进入以游牧为主要经济方式的时代。     

HLO1‐south: An Early Neolithic site in Wadi al‐Hilo (Sharjah,UAE)

Site HLO1 (Sharjah, UAE), situated in a particularly favourable geographical position, has provided an extraordinary range of anthropogenic radiocarbon dates, spanning before 8000 to Zero BCE. The Neolithic is represented by finds from the eighth to the fifth millennium BCE. Apart from the dated fireplaces, however, there are almost no typical artefacts of this period. Small stone structures appear to have been early Neolithic graves. A middle Neolithic grave consisted of a large rounded stone heap which was reused as a grave during the Late Bronze Age. The site is interpreted as a campsite of nomadic herders, used throughout the Neolithic period. After a break in the fourth millennium BCE, the site became a Bronze Age smelting site which continued to be settled until the Late Iron Age.     

文明交往视阈下16世纪布哈拉汗国的经济发展

1500年布哈拉汗国的建立拉开了中亚近代史的序幕。乌兹别克人的南下加快了河中地区游牧文明与农耕文明的交往,促使汗国经济发展步入转折期。在继承和变革帖木儿王朝经济制度的前提下,16世纪汗国的农牧经济得到恢复和发展,手工业进一步完善,对外贸易重新活跃,从而对中亚近代文明交往产生了深远影响。乌兹别克人在与河中地区各民族频繁交往的过程中,其经济生活逐渐转向农业,并接受中亚传统的伊斯兰教,从而实现了中亚农耕文明和伊斯兰文化的传承与发展。     

当前青南牧区经济社会发展中值得关注的几个问题

当前在青南牧区经济社会发展中存在着几个值得关注的问题。诸如虫草经济问题、三江源生态移民的后续产业发展问题、如何抑制部落势力的消极影响问题等等。笔者在调查研究的基础上对这些问题作一简要分析。     

青海农牧区图书馆建设之我见

享受图书馆的服务是全体公民的权利。但目前青海农牧区图书馆建设及其服务工作不能满足青海农牧区社会经济发展的需要。必须采取有效措施,加强图书馆建设,更好地为农牧民提供信息服务。     

Exchange patterns,boundary formation,and sociopolitical change in Late Bronze Age Southern Caucasia: preliminary results from a pottery provenance study in northwestern Armenia

In the South Caucasus—roughly the territory of today's Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan—the transition from the Middle Bronze Age (MBA) to the Late Bronze Age (LBA) is equated with fundamental shifts in settlement patterns, subsistence economy, and political strategies. During the mid-2nd millennium BC, nomadic pastoral societies that had dominated the region began to settle down and construct stone fortresses along the foothills of the Lesser Caucasus; these fortifications largely replaced the expansive and often opulently adorned kurgan burials as the most prominent expression of political dominance on the landscape. After a decade of intensive archaeological study at various fortifications, very little remains known about the political and economic relationships among fortresses on a regional scale that might improve our understanding of the roots of these sociopolitical transformations. In this paper, we highlight the results of a recent neutron activation analysis (NAA) of ceramics from elite and non-elite contexts at a selection of LBA fortresses on the Tsaghkahovit Plain in northwestern Armenia, and offer some preliminary interpretations about political and economic organization and boundary formation. Most strikingly, the NAA data suggest that the fortresses on the Tsaghkahovit Plain appear to have isolated themselves economically from surrounding valleys, perhaps in an attempt to forge boundaries and legitimating ideologies attendant to new political formations that were quite distinct from their nomadic predecessors in the MBA.     

大同南郊北魏墓群人骨的稳定同位素分析

探索中原地区农耕文明对游牧民族的影响,对于揭示游牧民族的汉化过程、了解民族间的相互交流和融合具有非常重要的意义。本文对山西大同南郊北魏(拓跋鲜卑)墓群出土的人骨进行了C、N稳定同位素分析,旨在揭示其食物结构的基础上探讨农耕文化对其生活方式的影响。一至四期出土人骨的δ13C值为-9.12±0.85‰,表明其主要以C4类食物为主,而其δ15N值(9.56±0.76‰)甚高,显示先民曾摄取大量肉食,即拓跋鲜卑进入中原地区之后,似乎仍以畜牧业为主,而受中原地区农耕文明的影响甚小。至于δ13C和15N异常的四个样品,可能来自其他地区。结合考古资料和相关文献,不难发现,与慕容鲜卑相比,拓跋鲜卑的汉化之路更为艰难。     

Alternative Complexities: The Archaeology of Pastoral Nomadic States

Almost a century of systematic anthropological research on pastoral nomads has produced significant data and theory for understanding these mobile societies. Substantially less attention has been devoted to complex sociopolitical organization among pastoral nomadic groups and, in particular, to the large-scale polities referred to as nomadic confederations, states, or sometimes empires. This article reviews established ideas for how and why complex organization emerged among nomadic groups and then considers these ideas in the context of recent archaeological theory on statehood and new material evidence for pastoral nomadic prehistory. Revised conceptions of both the state and the nomad suggest that pastoral nomadic polities represent alternative forms of complex organization that were different from classic Old World states but still quite complex in unexpected ways. These organizational differences resulted from the mobile and flexible politics practiced among herding peoples and gave rise to regional polities based on spatial networking, distributed authority, and innovations in transport and exchange.     

土尔扈特蒙古西迁后的经济状况及其对东归的影响

土尔扈特蒙古西迁至伏尔加河流域后,其经济状况可以概括为:传统游牧经济由盛而衰;以互通有无为基础的对俄贸易往来不断;为俄国军事战役出兵助战获得战利品和报酬成为特殊的收入来源;突袭其他民族和控制贸易路线是增加财富的渠道之一;捕鱼成为相当一部分生活贫困的土尔扈特人赖以维持生计的重要方式。作者认为经济状况恶化是促使土尔扈特蒙古东归的原因之一。     

PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY'S RETURN

Kojin Karatani's Structure of World History seeks to rescue the philosophy of history and restore to it the relationship between philosophical reflection and historical practice. This connection is particularly pertinent in Karatani's case since he had earlier worked out the philosophical scaffolding of this monumental study in his book Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, which embarked on a “return to Capital once more to read the potential that has been overlooked.” By juxtaposing Marx to Kant and vice versa to discover the importance of exchange over production, he found what was to become the informing principle of his later philosophy of history. While Karatani's accounting of the structure of world history presumes to recount the passage of the world's history from nomadic societies to the present as a condition to rethink “social formations” from a perspective that recalls the form of a stagist philosophy of history attributed to Marx and Engels, he has abandoned its informing principle of the modes of production. Instead, he offers the perspective of modes of exchange, which means waiving any consideration concerning who owns the means of production: the putative “economic base” underlying superstructural representations like the state, religion, and culture upheld by a vulgate tradition of Marxian historical writing and discounted by bourgeois historiography as deterministic. The decision to shift to modes of exchange means rooting the primary mode of exchange taking place first in nomadic societies, rather than forms of production and archaic communal ownership of land. Although his revised scheme still accords priority to the economic, the putative division between base and superstructures still persists, even though the latter are still produced by the former, which is now the mode of exchange. Whereas Marx privileged commodity exchange as dominant, Karatani places greater emphasis on the earliest mode of exchange, which consists of the “pure gift,” associated with early nomadic social formations and reciprocity practices by clans, and seems to offer nomadic/clan communalism as a model that resembles Marx's own strategic linking of the surviving Russian commune and contemporary capitalism. The point to this project is to transcend the hegemonic trinity of capital, nation, and state and satisfy a desire to share with other globalists a vision that aims to overcome the defects of capitalism and the nation‐state and the failure of a Marxian expectation that nation‐states will simply wither away with the final surpassing of capitalism. To this end, Karatani's appeal to Kant offers to inject a moral element absent in the merely economic structure of history that will thus provide the promise of “world peace,” which ultimately requires an abolition of the nation‐state as a condition for realizing a “simultaneous bourgeois revolution” that would finally overcome state and capital and establish a world federation.     

清代至民国甘青宁地区农牧经济消长与生态变迁

清代至民国时期甘青宁地区农牧交界带农耕和游牧民族因生存而争夺“草场和耕地资源”,此消彼涨的纷争和一些不适当的经济活动,一方面弱化了这里原本脆弱的生态环境,使人居自然环境质量下降,生态失衡加重。另一方面也引发了一系列社会矛盾,乃至武装冲突事件,成为社会不稳定的因素。     

The Early Bronze Age funerary archaeological landscape of western Ja'alan: results of three seasons of investigation

This paper presents the results of three seasons of investigations in the western part of Ja'alan in the southern al‐Sharqyiah Governorate in the Sultanate of Oman. The results highlight the importance of this part of Ja'alan during the Early Bronze Age (EBA), particularly the Hafit period and provide us with important information about the funerary archaeological landscape during this period. The results also reveal important aspects of landscape utilisation and occupation during this time and add to our knowledge of the cultural and economic facets of the earliest Bronze Age societies. The distribution of tombs in the landscape suggests that they were constructed by nomadic or semi‐nomadic pastoral groups that shifted from one location to another in search of grazing for their livestock. The availability and seasonality of natural resources such as water, pasture and game made it necessary for them to mark their tribal territory with their funerary structures.     

鄂温克族绘画图像研究

鄂温克族是一个游牧民族,其绘画也带有非常浓厚的游牧特色。鄂温克族的绘画以树皮为纸,融艺术性和实用性于一体,同时描摹常见的自然景观。在各种自然景观之中,鹿作为一种重要的图腾出现。而这些特色都让鄂温克族美术表现出自然感和亲切感。     

Demographic transition theory: a neglected aspect of the nomadism-sedentarism continuum

This paper proposes an adaptation of demographic transition theory to the nomadism-sedentarism continuum. It is argued that a change along this continuum implies a change in the mode of production, which in turn entails changes in fertility and mortality. The following hypotheses are set forth: 1) at the pastoral phase of a nomadic society, fertility is relatively low and mortality is relatively high, yielding a low rate of natural increase; 2) as a pastoral nomadic society senentarizes, fertility begins to rise and mortality falls, resulting in a sharp rise in natural increase, but as sedentarization becomes more advanced, both these trends slow down somewhat; 3) as the nomadic society becomes fully sedentarized, there is a period in which fertility remains at a high level but then begins to fall slowly, whereas mortality, after reaching a temporary minimum, exhibits a minor increase followed by a resumption of a declining trend; and 4) in the postsedentarization phase, the demographic regime of the ex-nomads becomes similar to the 2nd and 3rd stages of the original demographic transition theory, with a slowdown of the decline in mortality, followed by a later slowdown of fertility and of the rate of natural increase. The hypothesis of rising fertility among sedentarizing nomads is related to both social modernization and economic growth and development, including an improved standard of living and public health services. The interrelated processes of general societal responses to population growth and the changing role of children in the family are assumed to account for the eventual fertility decline. Data from several countries, including a case history from Israel, suggest that birth rates increase along the continuum but their decline at postsedentarization will depend on trends in the general rural sector. Natural increase rates of sedentarizing nomads are considerably higher than those of pastoral nomads. It is concluded that this approach may fill a gap in demographic transition theory and provide a conceptual framework for future studies.