Abstract
This paper is an attempt to use post-processual methodology to study the bronze ding of the Chinese Bronze Age. Based on the theoretical framework of Alfred Gell and Mike Parker Pearson, the author uses the concept of agency in his inquiry about the relations between the ritual bronze ding and its owners. The purpose of the paper is to explore the effectiveness of this new methodology beyond the traditional paradigm of Chinese archaeology.
The Research Question and the Methodology
The bronze ding has been one of the most studied bronze vessels in the Chinese Bronze Age (roughly between 2000 B.C.E to 700 B.C.E). A very large number of bronze dings were excavated in the tombs of the Shang dynasty (c.a.1600–1050 B.C.) and the Western Zhou dynasty (c.a.1046–770 B.C.). The number started to decline in the Eastern Zhou period (c.a.770-221 B.C.). Started as a cooking vessel, the bronze ding evolved over time. It became a ritual vessel, and later a symbol of status and power. Today, the bronze ding signifies the zenith of the Chinese bronze artifacts. Copious archaeologist studies have been conducted on its diverse shapes, sophisticated taotie decorations, and informative inscriptions. Yet, many questions are still to be asked about this most prominent ritual vessel of the ancient time. One of the interesting inquiries is the relations between the bronze ding and its owner.
According to the ancient canonical text the Book of Rites, ding usage must comply with its owner’s social status. Kings and dukes were entitled to use as many as nine dings to perform rituals; the second-tier aristocrats were allowed seven dings; the third-tier and lower rankings nobles had lower quotas. Common men were prohibited to use any ritual ding. Rules like this may seem trivial today, but in the Bronze Age China they were crucial in the system of power. The symbolic numbers of dings visually reinforced the owner’s social status, and consequently strengthened the social stratification (Loehr 1968).
This example shows that the ancient people canonized the relations between the bronze ding and the social status of its owner. However, these canonized relations are too simplistic for the understanding of the Bronze Age society. There is more complexity in these relations. Many burials have been found deviating the written principles.[i] More importantly, the complexity comes from the fact that many bronze dings we found today were from ancient graves, which contradict the designation of the ritual vessel that were not meant to be buried. Another complexity is the treachery of the ding inscriptions. Text inscriptions have been found in many bronze dings. They usually contained information of to whom the ding was made and for what purposes the ding was designated. One of the most common lines of inscription was that the ding was made for so-and-so to “pass it along to his sons and grandsons, and many generations to come.” (Zhang 1982) This inscription seems to indicate that the bronze ding was an heirloom. Surprisingly, many dings with such an inscription were buried with their owners without being passed down to their offspring. The discrepancy between what was written and what actually happened has puzzled many archeologists. This paper is an attempt to provide tentative answers to these questions and to explore the relations between the bronze ding and its owner.
I need to note that this paper is not the study of afterlife beliefs of the Bronze Age people. Many archeologists have done research to decipher the symbolic meanings of the bronze ding in ritual practices. In so doing, they have successfully shed light on ancient religions and beliefs of Chinese civilization. New Archeologists and post-processual archaeologists, however, generally avoid setting foot on the terrain of afterlife. What the ancient people perceived their afterlife, as these archaeologists believe, can not be conveniently observed through material studies; to assume ancient metaphysical beliefs is to project present day beliefs onto our ancient past, and result in the pitfall of “anachronism.” On the one hand, this paper acknowledges that studying the afterlife of Chinese Bronze Age is certainly important and productive because there are significant numbers of referential ancient texts available to conduct the research; on the other hand, this paper attempts to depart from the paradigm of Chinese archaeology, and to try out a more post-processual perspective. With this aim, this paper is more committed to material studies than linguistic evidences. Ancient beliefs of afterlife were thus not the concern.
The research paper is neither a study of the symbolism of the bronze ding. Symbolism has hitherto underlined most studies of ancient Chinese culture because there are many ancient texts for reference. Since ancient ritual is highly sophisticated, the symbolic meanings of the ding is certainly equally sophisticated. However, the paper does not quest for further symbolic meaning of the bronze ding. Although the paper piggybacks on some scholarship that is based on the symbolism of the bronze ding, the paper will focus on the material studies of the bronze ding.
The perspective of this paper is based on the agency of the bronze ding and the social relations connected by the agency. Anthropologist Alfred Gell, in his book Art and Agencey, accentuates the idea of agency as the focal point of his examination of arts and artifacts. He suggests that we see objects as if they were alive and as if they were “social agents,” because they have agency to impact social relations. Social relations are therefore defined as interactions not only among the living people, but also extended to non-living objects. (Gell 1998) This agency-oriented theory has since then become popular among many anthropologists and archaeologists who study remote past civilizations. The popularity of this theory is partly because it helps us see things in more relative terms. The ancient worlds were much more phenomenological than we are today. For example, in the context of the Chinese Bronze Age, the bronze ding was considered alive in the ancient time. People believed that the ding of a state could walk away if the ruler had lost his legitimacy of power. This perception allowed people to accept the power shift from an old ruler to a new one. In Gell’s discourse, we can say the quasi-living bronze ding exerted agency over the power relations of the Bronze Age society. This paper will take on this perspective to quest more complex agency of the bronze ding, so as to provoke new thoughts on the ding’s relations to the individuals and society at large.
Within the framework of agency, Mike Parker Pearson suggests some important theories in the archaeology of death and burial. He claims that “society was now considered to be constituted by agency rather than roles.” (Parker Pearson 1999) By roles, he means that a “pre-ordained social roles.” The traditional role-theory posits that the ancient people were acting out pre-existing social roles like “automatons.” For example, to say that people of the Shang and the Zhou dynasty were dictated by ritual rules is to engage in role-theory perspective. In contrast to this theory, Parker Pearson argues that people were “knowledgeable and improvising actors,” who constantly and actively manipulated their social roles. To put this view in the bronze ding context, kings, dukes, noblemen, and commoners were all the individuals who constantly engaged in social activities to negotiate, enhance, reinforce, or downgrade the status quo of themselves or others. Examples of such activities include conspicuous ones such as consanguineal marriage that strengthen the family solidarity and uprising that shuffled social stratifications, and more subtle ones such as the manipulation of personal belongings. This human agency constituted the social dynamics of the Bronze Age society. The static view of the social roles could some times overlook such dynamics.
In my view, the role-theory, on one hand, is helpful to understand the big picture of ancient Chinese society and to construct a coherent narrative, particular for historians, sociologists, and some archaeologists whose research is generally macro-sociological, such as the research of the Book of Rites; on the other hand, the fixation of roles could overshadow specific deviations, especially for anthropologists and some other archaeologists whose work is more micro-social, such as the analysis of some strange inscriptions in the bronze ding. Agency, in contrast, as will be shown below, provides archaeologists a more flexible view to address peculiar cases. Thus, the methodology of agency, although seems at odd with the traditional paradigm, is in fact complementing the traditional role-theory. Both methodologies are contributive to the better understanding of the Chinese Bronze Age society. The combination of both in a research, if necessary, could formulate more comprehensive and effective analysis.
That said, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the vigor of using the agency approach in the study of Chinese archaeology, in hope that more research can take on this approach in this field. To do so, I first need to qualify the broad research question and make it manageable.
Refining the research question
The relations between the bronze ding and its owner are a broad research question. One of the more specific questions is why the bronze ding was buried. The bronze ding was a kind of liqi (ritual vessel or ritual paraphernalia). Liqi was differentiated by the ancient people from yongqi (utilitarian utensil) and mingqi (funerary object). Liqi was designated to use in ritual performances. Unlike the funerary object, which was made exclusively for burial, liqi was not meant to be buried. Strangely, a large number of them ended up in tombs. To understand these strange phenomena, it is helpful to start with the relations between tomb burial and ancestor worship.
Wu Hung, in his book Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture, lays out clearly the changing practices of ancestor worship over the course of Chinese Bronze Age. In Shang and Western Zhou period, the privileged people paid tribute to their ancestors at the ancestral temples. Since the Eastern Zhou period forward, the location of worshiping ancestors had gradually changed to the mausoleums. Insides these mausoleums, these were usually ceremonial halls on top of the graves. These ceremonial halls were the places where ritual activities took place. As time went on to the mid first century A.D., however, the center of ancestor worship had shifted again to the tombs. “The graveyard was no longer the silent world of the deceased; it became a center of social activities. The family graveyards provided the common people with a proper place for banquets, musical performances and art displays.” (Wu 1995)
According to Wu Hung, these changes took place because the social structures transformed. In the Shang and the Western Zhou period, patrilineage was the dominant social structure, in which people were identified by their ancestors. Therefore, people built ancestral temples to commemorate their ancestors because ancestors were more important than the living people and the recent dead. Since Eastern Zhou, ancestral linkage had weakened; instead, individualism was on the rise. People built personal mausoleums for themselves because the recent dead were more important than their ancestors.
Wu Hung’s view of the social change is important to our research question in two aspects. First, since the graveyard was once the place for ritual activities and “art display,” it is therefore logical to find ritual dings in these ancient graves. Second, since patrilineage was once the most important social system, people were identified by their family clan rather than by the independent individual. Therefore, the inscription of “for X and his sons and grandsons” could be just an abstract expression for X’s family clan. When a bronze ding was commissioned and given to the receiver X, it was not considered a personal gift to X; rather, it was to X’s family clan. Therefore, the inscription is not to be interpreted literally. What it simply meant was “this is a gift to X’s family clan.” It did not necessarily mean to designate the bronze ding to be passed down for generations. In fact, since the ding was made for the family clan, any zongzi (leading host of the family) of X’s family clan had the ding at his disposal, including burying it if he might.
That said, there are still questions to be answered. Why is it that a large number of bronze dings were buried before the burial paradigm shift to the graves in mid first century? (although Wu has suggested that the temple ritual and grave ritual did not have a clear-cut timeline.) I would suggest an ecological explanation below. But before that, I would further examine the agency of the bronze ding based on Parker Pearson’s theories.
Human Agency and Artifact Agency
One of the complications for the bronze ding research is the pottery dings. The pottery ding, which has been found since the Neolithic Age, preceded the bronze ding. The majority of these pottery dings were considered as yongqi. However, among them, some are identified as the ritual ware. Many archaeologists believed that the ritual pottery ding was replaced by the ritual bronze ding when entering the Bronze Age. (Wang Yong, Wang Yuling 2005) Yet, surprisingly, a significant number of ritual pottery dings have been found in the tombs of the Eastern Zhou period (c.a.770-221 B.C.), and even Han dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE). Why did the people of the Eastern Zhou period forward still make pottery dings for burial when they had already perfected the bronze making technique?
A case study of the ritual pottery ding may shed some light on this question. There is a recently excavated tomb in Anhui Province in China. Known as “the Liu-an Twin Tombs,” it consists of two parts: the North Grave and the South Grave. The tomb is dated back to the Warring State period (c.a.403-221B.C. considered part of the Eastern Zhou dynasty). Inside the South Grave, there are many mortuary goods, including bronze dings and many other bronze wares. Surprisingly, the assemblage includes a few pottery dings. These pottery dings were very likely to be ritual vessels because first, they were much more intricate than utilitarian objects, and second, they were decorated with taotie motif. In fact, the physicality of the pottery dings look very similar to the bronze dings besides them (Fig.1). This finding leads the Chinese archaeologist on the excavation site Wang Xin to believe that these pottery dings were faking the bronze ones.[ii] He explains that the Warring States period was devastated with wars, and the aristocrats could not obtain as much bronze as their ancestors in the Shang and the Western Zhou dynasties. Alternatively, they made dings out of pottery, a material that was easier to get.
To read the complete article, please email me at dong@sudongyue.com. This is an academic paper and I do not want to post it all in here.