商周时期江南地区土墩遗存的分区研究

ON THE REGIONALIZATION OF SHANG AND ZHOU BARROWS IN THE SOUTHERN CHANGJIANG RIVER VALLEY

During the Shang and Zhou periods, the construction of barrows (including earthmounded tombs and earth-mounded stone-chambered ones) was prevailing in the southern Changjiang River valley. Although their periodization and cultural nature have been discussed in a number of articles, some crucial problems call for re-understanding due to lack of researches with a regionalizing approach. The present paper attempts to make a systematic study of Shang and Zhou barrows in all the southern Changjiang valley with the purpose to reveal their evolutionary process and developmental direction and inquire into their cultural nature. Through regionalization, periodization and a comparative study of the characteristics of different regional cultures the author comes to the conclusion that ancient barrows were gradually spread from south to north. They appeared first in the southern Huangshan Tiantaishan mountain region at the turning point from the Xia to the Shang period, had northward spread to the Taihu Lake-Hangzhou Bay region at latest by the late Shang, and finally reached the Naming-Zhenjiang region in the early Western Zhou. A typological comparison of typical pottery shows that barrows originated from the Jiantouneng type of Maqiao culture. In cultural relations, the barrows in the southern Huangshan-Tiantaishan region and those in the Taihu Lake-Hangzhou Bay region were kindred phenomena, whereas those in the Naming-Zhenjiang region constituted a mixture of traditional elements of the local Hushu culture with southern cultural components, having no direct inheritance relationship with those in the other two regions. Moreover, ancient barrows were closely related to the origins of the Wu and Yue cultures. The barrows of the Shang period in the southern Huangshan-Tiantaishan region and the Taihu Lake-Hangzhou Bay region must have been one of the sources of the Yue culture, while those of the Zhou period in the southern Changjiang valley already belonged to the Wu and Yue cultures-those in the Naming-Zhenjiang region largely to the Wu culture, and those in the other two regions to different branches of the Yue people around the founding of the Yue state. The barrows of the middle and late Spring and Autumn period in the Taihu Lake basin were an important component part of the Wu and Yue cultures, constituting an archaeological reflection of the Wu and Yue peoples’ "identity in custom".