EAANnouncements 1
June 1990
Contents
AAS meeting reports: Minutes of the formative meeting of the East Asian Archaeology Network
Held on 6 April 1990 7.30 at the Chicago AAS meetings.
Approximately 30 people attended the Roundtable Discussion on "Politics and Procedures for Archaeological Fieldwork in Asia" scheduled at the above time. This roundtable served as the forum for the formal constitution of the EAAN with Gina Barnes presiding. Chris Borstel (Indiana Univ) and Frances Allard (Univ Pennsylvania) have offered to perform secretarial duties within North America for the Network, and Gina Barnes will oversee the general organisational and financial ends of things; Sarah Taylor and Simon Kaner (both Cambridge Univ) will act as secretarial and treasury backup in the UK. A current account at Barclays Bank in Cambridge is being opened in the Network's name, and application is being made to have the Network registered as a charity for tax purposes.
The stated aim of the Network is to further education by facilitating greater communication among scholars interested in the archaeology of China, Korea and Japan. It is proposed that a meeting of the Network be held every year in conjunction with AAS meetings and minutes circulated afterwards as EAANnouncements. These meetings will have a focus for discussion and the chair will rotate through the membership. If anyone has ideas for subjects to be dealt with next year, or items for the next 'nouncements, please send them to:
Dr. Gina Barnes, Senior Researcher
St. John's College, Cambridge
CB2 1TP ENGLAND
Tel. (0223)357060-home, 333322-office
FAX (0223)333503; EMAIL:
Network Registration: If you haven't returned your Registration form, please do so soon.
I need both your signature on the form to make it legal to keep your address on my computer, and
your one-off fee payment is needed to offset xeroxing and postage until a grant to underwrite costs
can be obtained.
Report on the Roundtable Discussion: "Politics and Procedures for Archaeological Fieldwork in Asia", held at the Chicago AAS meetings on April 6, 1990.
This roundtable was moderately successful despite a severe mixup in the listings of its contents in the AAS programme. The actual presentations given were by Sarah Nelson (Univ Denver) on Earthwatch participation on her data-collection project in Korea, and by Gina Barnes (Cambridge Univ) for Japan on her excavation at the Miwa site in Nara and on the excavations at the Yoshinogari site in Saga.
Earthwatch Project in Korea: No summary submitted.
Miwa site, Nara Prefecture:
A portion of the Miwa site on the Tenri-kyo Shikishima Church grounds in Sakurai City were excavated
between Aug 20 and Sept 9, 1989 by an international team compiled from five universities in Japan,
Canada, England, and Holland under the direction of GL Barnes. This is the first time that a
non-resident foreigner has been given a direct permit to excavate in Japan, and the purpose of my
presentation at the Roundtable was to describe the application process so that more permits might be
applied for by foreigners in the future. The crucial documents that were necessary for the project
were suprisingly, first: signed 'commitments' with each of the senior researchers involved in the
project. These commitments were typed up by us and implied that the researcher agreed to commit
him/herself to the project's aims and carry out their responsibilities as directed. In the case
where the researcher was a government (rather than university employee), application had to be made
to their employing institution to ask for their 'loan' during the project. These commitments for the
excavation were signed in April 1989 after two previous seasons of fieldwork doing preliminary
surface investigations on site and after all the notifications for grant monies for the excavation
had been received.
The next step was to submit the formal application form for excavation to the local Board of Education. Advice in obtaining and filing this form was given to us by one of the government archaeologists in Sakurai City; he was a formal member of our project, having signed a 'commitment', and he served as our liaison with the government hierarchy. The application was submitted in late April, and the landowner's permission-in the form of a 'commitment' was obtained after submission in early May. The excavation permit itself was issued on August 11th but not delivered to us until September 4th. We had, nevertheless, begun our excavation as scheduled on August 21st with tacit assurances that our application was not going to be denied.
The Lost Properties Law states that all archaeological discoveries must be notified to the local police within 7 days, and this applies to excavations as well as accidental finds. Within a week of completing the excavation, therefore, we were supposed to have submitted a list of the exact numbers of artefacts found in various categories. This aspect of the notification procedure tripped us up a bit. We lacked adequate lab staff to sort, identify, date and record all the finds within one week of finishing on site. We got around this requirement by quantifying our finds in bulk terms rather than specific counts (e.g. 4 boxes of Yayoi sherds, etc.), which apparently was quite acceptable. And we also submitted our report a little late, which was grudgingly permitted. In future excavations, I would advise that this legal requirement be catered to in setting up the artefact processing procedure and database format.
The finds themselves were donated to the Tenri Sankokan Museum for curation. It is likely that the government will deem them not valuable enough for national status, and in that event, it will be possible to apply to take them out of the country. However, there is at least a 20-year backlog of materials awaiting evaluation, so no short-term prospects present themselves for exporting the material. There is no inherent bias against foreign teams in this respect, just a tremendous inertia imposed by mountains of finds.
The final bureaucratic hurdle was the submission of a report to the Agency for Cultural Affairs within 6 months of the end of the excavation. Our preliminary report of 84 pages was submitted in early March, just under the deadline.
If anyone is interested in more detailed information on the procedures described here, or if they would like samples of the commitment forms we drew up, please contact me with your request. I would hope that more fieldwork can be carried out in Japan in the future, and I happily report that I did not encounter any undue difficulties in arranging the Miwa Project so other researchers should not be discouraged from trying.
GL Barnes
Yoshinogari site, Saga Prefecture:
The Yoshinogari site occupies 36 hectares on a low ridge extending into the Saga plains. 30 hectares
of the site were excavated in 1986-89 for an industrial park; the recovered materials spanned the
Palaeolithic to Medieval periods, but the bulk were Yayoi. These were most impressive, totaling 350
buildings including pit-houses, watchtowers and granaries; 200 burial jars, 380 pit-graves, 6
wood-coffin burials,13 stone cists and a large mound-burial with a central jar interment. Some of
these structures occurred within the double moats of a 25-hectare village. Among the 8000 cases of
Yayoi artefacts were shell bracelets, linen and silk fragments, human hair, pottery, magatama beads;
ceramic: spindle whorls, bell-shaped objects, stone: moulds, reaping knives, sickles, axes, chisels,
querns, grinding stones, whetstones, arrowheads, stone daggers and halberds; iron: axes, spade
shoes, sickles, point planes, arrowheads and knives; and bronze: weapons, cogwheel ornaments.
In addition, 550 Nara~Heian-period buildings and 150 early historic wells were also excavated.
The significance of this site lies in its richness of well-preserved deposits and their broad exposure. The moated Yayoi village is the best example of its kind, and its structure has been compared to the description of Queen Himiko's residence as written in the 3rd-century Weizhi. This is unfortunate in a way, since the press has jumped to conclusions and touted Yoshinogari as connected to Yamatai-koku. Although of the same time period, this site was probably the settlement of a regional group in a backwater area, much as it is today. Nevertheless, nearly 2 million people have already visited the site, and the interest stirred up by the media has ensured its preservation as a historical park for future pilgrimages.
Mark Hudson & GL Barnes
CHANG (Chinese History and Archaeology Networking Group)
CHANG grew out of a conference held at Stanford University on "The Application of Microcomputers to
Chinese Archaeology" and has been in existence for about two years. Registration forms for the
network are available from Prof. Al Dien (Department of East Asian Languages, Stanford University,
Stanford CA 94305). The group's brief is the application of computer technology in the fields of
Chinese History and Archaeology, although at their meeting in conjunction with the Chicago AAS,
linguistics and other disciplines were also represented. CHANG runs an electronic bulletin board for
Chinese history and archaeology, and anyone who sends in their EMAIL address to EAAN will get it
transferred to CHANG automatically. Not only will you be receiving notices from CHANG, if you want
to post anything on the bulletin board yourself, just send your message to [...].
Two of the projects reported by CHANG members were:
1) a music archaeology database consisting of 600 items from Neolithic to the end of Han at the Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan (contact [...])
2) a database using Dataease of 1500 Six Dynasties tombs developed by Al Dien at the Asian Languages Department, Stanford University. These will be the basis for a volume on the Six Dynasties period in the Yale series of publications on Chinese archaeology overseen by K.C. Chang.
A crucial issue discussed at the meeting was how to make these databases available for use while protecting proprietary software rights, protecting against computer viruses, and maintaining and controlling the master copy by centralising data input, etc. In making the databases available, should it operate as a lending library for disk copies or only circulate hard copies (which give no opportunity for analytical manipulation without inputting again). These are hard questions to answer; please ponder them.
First Emperor Video:
An educational video has been developed on Qin Shi Huang Di, and now a NEH grant has been obtained
for promotional road show. Contact Dr. Robin D.S. Yates at 301A Bartlett Hall, Asian Studies
Program, Dartmouth College, Hanover NH 03755 for further information on its availability.
MEMBER NEWS (in alpha-order):
Mr. Chris BORSTEL (Chinese prehistoric archaeology)
Department of Anthropology
108 Rawles Hall, University of Indiana
Bloomington, IN 47405 USA
Home tel. 812-333-7322
Work tel. 812-855-1203
Bitnet: [...]
Internet: [...]
Chris has received a fellowship for advanced graduate study from the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the Peoples' Republic of China (CSC-PRC) for 1990-91. The fellowship will provide support for dissertation research on environmental change and cultural change in the lower Changjiang (Yangtze) River region during the Neolithic period. The project will include analyses of distribution and contents of sites in relation to the regional paleogeography in the Neolithic period and a detailed examination of well-documented sites using a site catchment approach. It will draw extensively on published reports, but these will be supplemented by examinations of museum collections and visits to site locations.
Dr. Gina L. BARNES (East Asian archaeology; prehistory to early historic)
Department of Archaeology
Downing St., Cambridge CB2 3DZ UK
Home tel. 0223-357060
Work tel. 0223-333322
FAX 0223-333503
EMAIL: [...]
My post-doc has been renewed at St. John's until Sept 1996.Prof. Gary CRAWFORD (East Asian archaeology; pre- & proto-history)
Department of Anthropology
Erindale Campus, Univ. Toronto
Mississauga, Ontario L5L 1C6 CANADA
Home tel. 416-820-1023
Work tel. 416-828-5292
FAX 416-828-5328
Gary has received a renewal of his Earthwatch grant for research on "Prehistoric Agriculture in Japan" during 1990-91. This complements his grant from the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council for 1989-90 for work on "Prehistoric Asian Agriculture on the Northern Frontier." He is currently involved in plant remains analyses for the following Japanese sites: Tosamuporo, Yagi, and Hokkaido University Campus. Gary was unable to attend the Chicago AAS meetings due to the birth of his new baby. Congratulations, Gary!Ms. Cathy D'ANDREA (EA archaeology, palaeo-ethnobotany, palaeo-environ; Dept. Anthropology , University of Toronto pre- & proto-history)
Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A1 CANADA
Home tel. 416-598-5675 Work tel. 416-978-5209
Cathy is busy working on her dissertation topic of "Later Jomon and Early Yayoi Subsistence, Aomori and Southern Hokkaido"
Dr. Lothar von FALKENHAUSEN (Chinese & Korean archaeology, art history, history, protohist & early hist)
Redtenbacherst. 11,
D4300 Essen-1
W. Germany
Lothar is currently finishing a fellowship at the Department of East Asian Languages, Stanford University and will be off on fieldwork to China for the academic year of 1990/1991. He will be collecting material for a book on Chinese ritual and civilisation during the Zhou Dynasty. Upon returning to the States in 1991, he will take up a position in the Department of the History of Art, University of California at Riverside. The above is his forwarding address until then.
Prof. Karl L. HUTTERER, Director (East Asian prehistoric archaeology)
The Burke Museum DB-10
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195 USA
Work tel. 206-543-5590
At the end of May, Karl left Ann Arbor after 18 years in the Museum of Anthropology in order to take up the Directorship of the Burke Museum at the University of Washington in Seattle. He will be sorely missed at the University of Michigan, but we wish him the best in his new post. Karl is one of the convenors of an upcoming conference on the "Politics of the Past" to be held by the Joint Committee on Southeast Asia of the SSRC and ACLS. He has put out a call for papers related to this topic for Southeast Asia; please contact him at the above address for further info.Prof. Fumiko IKAWA-SMITH (East Asian pre- & proto-historic archaeology)
Department of Anthropology
McGill University, 855 Sherbrooke St. W.
Montreal, Quebec H3A 2T7 CANADA
Home tel. 514-935-6045 Work tel. 514-398-4296
FAX 514-398-7476 EMAIL: [...]
Fumiko is working on the Late and Final Jomon of northern Japan and is planning a book-length work on the Jomon.Mr. Yun-kuen LEE (Chinese pre- & proto-historic archaeology)
Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1079 USA
Home tel. 313-763-8823 Work tel. 313-936-2950
Yun-kuen is working on his doctoral dissertation entitled "Tribal segmentation and intra-site spatial variability: the social organization of Jiangzhai."
Prof. Sarah M. NELSON (Chinese & Korean archaeology; prehistory-early Department of Anthropology history)
University of Denver, Denver CO 80208 USA
Home tel. 303-770-4733 Work tel. 303-871-2682
FAX 303-871-4000 BITNET: [...]
Prof. John W. OLSEN (Chinese prehistoric archaeology)
Department of Anthropology
The University of Arizona, Building 30
Tucson, Arizona 85721 USA
Work tel. 602-621-4321 or 2858
FAX 602-621-2088
BITNET: [...]
INTERNET: [...]
John will be on sabbatical from May 1990 to Aug 1991. In the summer of 1990, he will be conducting Palaeolithic fieldwork in the Taklamakan Desert in Xinjiang. Then he has received a Fulbright award to do fieldwork in the Kazakh and Turkmen republics of Soviet Central Asia between Sep 1990 and Jan 1991. During that time, he can be reached at the Institute of History and Ethnography, Kazakh State University, Alma Ata, Kazakh. In the spring of 1991, he hopes to be excavating in Viet Nam then return to China for the summer of 1991. No addresses are available for these stints as yet.Prof. Joan R. PIGGOTT (Japanese history; protohistoric~medieval)
Department of History
McGraw Hall, Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853-5601
Home tel. 607-277-6142 Work tel. 607-255-1881
FAX 607-254-5000 (c/o East Asia Program)
Joan has just moved from Miami University in Florida to Cornell after having completed research in Japan on a Japan Foundation research project entitled "Todaiji in the Heian Age."Ms. Kathryn R. WINTHROP (EA, esp. Korean, pre- & proto-historic archaeology)
Winthrop Associates Cultural Research
347 Guthrie St., Ashland, Oregon 97520 USA
Home & Work tel. 503-482-8004
Katie is currently studying for qualifying exams with the aim of doing doctoral research on the late Bronze Age in southwestern Korea.
CONFERENCE/EXHIBITION ANNOUNCEMENTS:
International Council for ArchaeoZoology, Smithsonian Institute, April 1990
The following paper was presented from East Asia:
Matsui, Akira: Archaeological investigation on salmon resources in Japanese history.
Association for Asian Studies, Chicago, 6 April 1990
Sarah Nelson convened a symposium entitled "Archaeology and politics: interactions of the past and the present" at which the following papers were presented:
Barnes, Gina L.: The 'Idea of Prehistory' in Japan
Bleed, Peter: Political processes in the practice and presentation of Japanese prehistory
Ikawa-Smith, Fumiko: Ideology of cultural homogeneity in Japanese archaeology
Nelson, Sarah M.: The politics of ethnicity in prehistory: a case study of Korea
Pai, Hyung Il: The invasion hypothesis in Korean prehistory
Price, Nancy Thompson: Ideology of the center in early Bronze Age China
Society for American Archaeology, Las Vegas,19 April 1990
The following papers were given at a symposium entitled "Tiger on the Horizon: a re-examination of 'Chinese influences' on the Manchurian Basin and Korean Peninsula", convened by GL Barnes:
Barnes, Gina L.: The Yellow Sea interaction sphere
von Falkenhausen, Lothar A.: The state of Yan and its northeastern connections
Nelson, Sarah M.: Echoes of ethnicity in the Korean Peninsula and Manchuria 6000-2000 BC
Pai, Hyung Il: Cultural interaction between the Lelang commanders and Iron Age Koreans
Taylor, Sarah: A cast-iron case of diffusion? Influences and Innovation in ancient Korean iron
production
Percival David Foundation Colloquy on Art and Archaeology in Asia 15 & Early China Seminar 10, 25-26 June, 90
The title for this Colloquy, organised by Roderick Whitfield and Sarah Allen and held at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London: "Problems of Meaning in Chinese Bronze Decoration". The provisional programme includes:
Allan, Sarah: Myth and meaning in Shang bronze decoration
Bagley, Robert: Shang Bronzes: art and explanation
Gao, Zhixi: Bronze musical instruments: the nao, zhong, bo and duiyu
Li, Xueqin: Liangzhu jades and the Shang dynasty taotie motif
Mackenzie, Colin: Symbols or ornament? Motifs and their stylistic manipulation in the art of Chu and
beyond
Rawson, Jessica: Late Shange bronze design: meaning or purpose?
Xiong, Chuanxin: Zoomorphic bronzes of the Shang and Zhou dynasties and animal worship in the East
IPPA meetings (Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association) 25 Aug - 2 Sept, 90
The 14th IPPA Congress will be held in Yoyakara, Indonesia. Peter Bellwood at the School of Pacific Research, ANU, Canberra, Australia is in charge. The papers scheduled on East Asian archaeology are:
Asato, Shijun: The distribution of shell adzes in the South Ryukyu Islands
Barnes, Gina: From Jomon to Yayoi
Keally, C. and Oda, S.: Origin and early development of ground/ edge-ground axes in Japan
Keally, Charles: Environment and the distribution of Palaeolithic sites in Japan
Keates, Susan: Artefact assemblages from two Lower Paleolithic localities in the Nihewan Basin,
north China
Kwok, Kian chow: 'The others' in Shang
Lee, Yung-jo: The life of Early Man at Turubong Cave: faunal and floral evidence
Liu, Jun: New discoveries related to Hemudu
Lyman, Helena Langrick: The role of Chinese trade ceramics in prehistoric Pila, Laguna, Philippines
Meacham, William: Relations between South China, Taiwan and Luzon in the Neolithic
Nelson, Sarah M.: Evidence for early agriculture in Korea; changing tool patterns
Park, Hi-Hyun: The Upper Palaeolithic habitation site at Ch'angnae, Korea
Pearson, Richard: Trade and the rise of the Okinawan state
Pope, Geoffrey: Replacement vs regionally continuous models; the current evidence from East Asia
Shin, Sook-Chong: Pottery and agriculture in Neolithic Korea
Shutler, Richard: A Pleistocene cultural sequence for East and Southeast Asia
Sohn, Pokee: A summary report on Pleistocene research in Korea
Takamiya, Hiroto; Hancock RGV & Pavlish, LA: The neutron activation analysis of Okinawan pottery:
can it indicate prehistoric contact?
Wu, Xinzhi: New palaeoanthropological finds from China and their significance in the study of human
evolution
Xu, Pingfang: The Bronze Age in southern China
Yan, Wenming: The Neolithic prehistory of southeastern coastal China
The Evolution and Dispersal of Modern Humans in Asia, 14-17 November
This is a University of Tokyo Symposium organised on a grand international scale by Takeru AKAZAWA of the University Museum. Among the many papers being presented, those dealing directly with East Asia are:
Braeuer, Goenter: The origins of modern Asians: by regional evolution or by replacement?
Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi-Luca: The contribution of East Asians to human evolution
Derevyanko, Anatoly: Problems forming of Late Palaeolithic north and central Asia and ancient
migrations in the Pacific regions
Dodo, Yukio: Population history of Japan based on cranial nonmetric variation
Kamminga, John: New interpretations of the Upper Cave, Zhoukoudian
Kimura, Tasuku and Takahashi, Hideo: Cross-sectional geometry of Minatogawa limb bones
Kozintsev, Alexander: The role of the Jomon population of Japan in the origins of Ainu and Japanese
people
Pietrusewsky, Michael: Modern and near-modern populations of Asia at the Pacific: a multivariate
craniometric interpretation
Pope, Geoffrey G.: The facial evidence of regionalism in the Far East
Qiu, Zhonglang: The problem of palaeoliths from early Homo Sapien sites in China
Tokunaga, Katsushi: The migration and dispersal of East Asian populations as viewed from HLA genes
and haplotypes
Turner, Christy G. II: The microevolution of East Asian and European populations: a dental
perspective
Ward, R.H.: On the origin and dispersion of the Asian phylogenies of Homo sapiens: a molecular
perspective
Wu, Xinzhi: Homo sapiens evolution in China
Exhibition of Archaeological Ceramics from Japan, 11 Dec '90 - 3 Feb '91
An exhibition with this tentative title is being organised by the Japan Society in New York to
be shown in the IBM Gallery in mid-town Manhattan. Jomon, Yayoi, Haji and Sue wares will be on
display, and a catalog will be available with essays on each ware written by Richard Pearson, Anne
Underhill, Ted Kidder, Gina Barnes, MIWA Karoku and Richard Mellott.