Rethinking Yuanlongpo : The Case for Technological Links between the Lingnan (PRC) and Central Thailand in the Bronze Age

Abstract

The aim of this article is to highlight, on the basis of the material evidence, both the coherence and the eventual weak points of the hypothesis that links early metallurgy in continental Southeast Asia to the 'long shadow' (Higham 2002: 116) cast by the sophisticated bronze industry of northern China related to its socially complex Erlitou-Shang-Zhou cultural sequence of the 2nd-lst millennia B.C.E. The artefacts which we discuss below, in fact, although dated between the second half of the 2nd millennium B.C.E. and the first quarter of the 1st millennium B.C.E., somehow have been seen as evidence supporting '[...] the possibility that the Southeast Asian tradition of copper-based metallurgy was initially stimulated by the spread of ideas and goods down the very rivers which introduced the rice farming groups a millennium or so earlier [...]' (i.e. late 3rd millennium B.C.E.) (Higham 1996:338) Following Higham s hypothesis of a southwards spread of ideas and goods from the Yangzi valley (1996: 337; 2002: 83-85), Rispoli demonstrated (2007) the role played by the network of river systems radiating out and into the Yangzi catchment in the expansion of agricultural communities towards the river plains of continental Southeast Asia, including Thailand. At the same time, scholars generally agree on the hypothesis that the same network favoured the filtering southward of the copper alloy technology, which is attested in the archaeological record as a full blown metallurgical tradition (2) in