分裂与延续:六朝士族文化与中华文明传承

In the Six dynasties, the clans of the scholar-official stratum not only occupied a dominant place in social and cultural life but also played an important role in maintaining Chinese civilization. As a succession of northern minorities entered the Central Plains, foreign culture became widespread and the Chinese people and culture experienced an unprecedented crisis. Thanks to the scholar-official clans who shouldered the burden of preserving Chinese culture, Chinese civilization was able to persist through the ages to become an “unbroken” civilization. These clans can be categorized in three groups according to their territorial origin: “Clans of the Wu Area” which developed in Jiangnan after the Han dynasty; “Immigrant Clans” which moved to Jiangnan from the north during the Jin dynasty and the ensuing dynasties, these being referred to jointly as “the Southern Clans”; and “the Northern Clans,” being those clans that remained in their homelands (Shandong and the Central Shaanxi Plain) during the period of ethno-national amalgamation in the north of China. Though these clans had various cultural characteristics due to different historical roots, cultural traditions and ancestry, their clan learning had a common core, i.e., the study and practice of Confucian rites as established in the Han dynasty. This formed the basis for the integration of Han with other cultures, making a sound foundation for the further development of the Chinese civilization.     

Personal,Political, Pedagogic: Challenging the Binary Bind in Archaeological Teaching,Learning and Fieldwork

In this paper, we consider how we can undercut the various binaries of gender and sexuality in archaeological practice and particularly in our teaching. We argue that taking an assemblage theory approach enables us to look at the multiplicity of identities of those practicing archaeology as different and intersecting assemblages that bring one another into being through their connections at different scales. In particular, we examine how this approach can be applied to archaeological pedagogy and how this in turn enables us to move away from modern binary distinctions about sex and gender identities from the ‘bottom up’, fostering an approach in our students that will then go on to be developed in professional practice.     

Her Mirror,His Sword: Unbinding Binary Gender and Sex Assumptions in Iron Age British Mortuary Traditions

At the site of Hillside Farm, Bryher, on the Isles of Scilly, a materially rich single Iron Age inhumation was discovered containing the unsexable fragmented remains of one adult with a number of high-quality metal grave goods including an iron sword with a bronze scabbard and a bronze mirror. Swords and mirrors have long been considered high-status, oppositionally gendered grave goods that crosscut regional divisions in the pre-Roman British Iron Age (c. 800 B.C.–A.D. 43). Their combined presence within the burial of a single individual represents a touchstone within the ongoing unraveling of a long-held, interconnected set of reified binary sex and gender assumptions that have permeated discussions of British Iron Age mortuary contexts. In better recognizing this web of “binary binds,” we can deconstruct the a priori, exclusionary, interconnected sex and gender assumptions that configure how we investigate the terms of engagement between materials and persons in these burial contexts. Crucial to this analysis is an approach to patterning that (1) does not begin with a search for sex and gender as evidence of male and female dichotomies, (2) sees the potentiality for any component of a mortuary assemblage to have multiple points of significance, and (3) embraces data ambiguity. Developing such critical approaches will ultimately contribute to the deployment of more inclusive forms of analysis that do not reify sex and gender as the primary organizing principles within mortuary contexts, aiding scholars in avoiding assumptions that bind sex and gender analyses into artificially binary paradigms.