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Chinese Neolithic Burial Patterns: Problems of Method and Interpretation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2015

Richard Pearson
Richard Pearson*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology and Sociology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver BC, Canada V6T 2B2
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Abstract

This paper reviews the interpretation of Chinese Neolithic burials by Chinese archaeologists, comparing their approaches to those of some processual and symbolic archaeologists of the West and also of western Marxist anthropologists. Descriptions of recent Chinese burial practices provide ethnoarchaeological comparison. The author concludes that there may have been a shift from “matrilineal” to “patrilineal” organization, but that this shift cannot be documented from archaeological data alone. Exploration of the spatial and symbolic aspects of the burials is advocated. The paper concludes with a pilot project devoted to the statistical discovery of sets of ceramic vessels used in rituals ancestral to those of the Bronze Age.

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Early China , Volume 13 , 1988 , pp. 1 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Study of Early China 1988

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