The NSF Archaeology Program High Risk Exploratory Research competition will permit Dr. Anne Underhill (Field Museum) and her colleagues at Shandong University, China, to test 3-5 potential sites in the Rizhao area of southeastern Shandong province for excavation. Through their systematic, regional survey for over a decade, Dr. Underhill and her Sino-American team located hundreds of settlements from the Longshan period, c. 2600-1900 B.C.. They identified a clear hierarchy with respect to the size of settlements and hypothesized that the site of Liangchengzhen, long known for its finely made pottery vessels and jade objects in an area over 100 hectares in size, was a regional center. Mainly utilitarian pottery vessels and stone tools were found at the smaller settlements judged to be subsidiary to the political center at Liangchengzhen. The team then excavated at Liangchengzhen from 1999-2001. What remains unclear however is the nature of the interactions between people living in the regional center and those in the smaller, outlying communities.
By excavating a smaller settlement contemporary to and located near Liangchengzhen, the team aims to investigate the nature of social, economic, political, and ritual relations in the late prehistoric, Liangchengzhen polity. The team will evaluate hypotheses about the emergence of urbanism, the nature of economic control (by means such as craft production and exchange) of smaller settlements by elites at Liangchengzhen, and mechanisms such as public rituals involving veneration of ancestors for social integration in the region. Achieving this goal will require extensive testing of the buried Longshan deposits at the smaller settlement sites. The team will work with local experts in probing and assessment of exposed profiles to identify buried residential areas dating to the Early and Middle phases of the Longshan period as at Liangchengzhen. The ideal site to be chosen for eventual excavation will have evidence for houses and residential debris (production and consumption of pottery and stone objects, rice and other grains, domesticated animals, and ritual remains such as unusually large pits containing pots with residues for fermented beverages). Since the sites to be tested were discovered by the team a decade ago, another task will be to assess the impact of modern farming and other activities on the buried deposits. The field season also will be devoted to an initial study of resource distribution (such as clays) and changes to the regional landscape during and after the Longshan period.
This NSF funded project will enable the continuation of one of the longest Sino-foreign collaborative fieldwork, training, and publication programs. The short testing phase will provide opportunities for archaeology students from the United States and Shandong University. The opportunity to adequately assess the deposits at the candidate sites for their potential to yield the kinds of artifacts necessary to test the nature of interactions between settlements is essential for the success of the future excavation. Few regional projects in China, home to one of the world's earliest civilizations, have involved studies of the range of possible hierarchical and horizontal relations between settlements and how polities developed prior to the establishment of the first literate dynasties.
