Ancient Highlands Of Southwest China

This book is about ancient Han China's southern frontier and how local elites interacted with the state's imperial reach. It synthesizes textual and archaeological materials from Southwest China to provide valuable insights for comparative studies of agents who alternately created, sustained, and resisted ancient empires.

Review: This archaeological history of Han China's southern frontier explores local elites' confrontation with the state's imperial reach through time. In synthesizing textual and archaeological materials from Southwest China, Yao's mortuary and landscape study offers valuable insights for comparative studies of agents who alternately created, sustained, and resisted ancient empires. * Miriam T. Stark, University of Hawai'i, Manoa * In a theoretically nuanced book, Alice Yao provides a rich empirical study of Southwest China during the period of Han imperialism. Her approaches to historicity, frontier, temporality, and periphery contribute new ideas to archaeological literature on identity and memory, and in the process undermine conventional views of indirect Han rule on the margins of empire. * Rowan K. Flad, Harvard University * ...a groundbreaking work in disentangling the complex history that is often clouded by a center-dominated narrative. It is a crucial theoretical contribution to the field...Her innovative anthropological approach...will contribute to revolutionizing our understanding of transmitted texts (e.g., bronze inscriptions) as the study of them often is often constrained by the text and its immediate archaeological contexts. It will also be valuable in the research of Bronze Age cultures and interactions in the central and marginal areas across China...There is thus no doubt that themethodologies and theories will be extremely influential to related fields. Beyond this, this book is also a great effort echoing James Scott's (2011) research on the peripheral societies and their significant role in the making of history. * Yijie Zhuang, American Anthropologist *