Catherine Churchman's The People Between the Rivers: The Rise and Fall of a Bronze Drum Culture, 200–750 CE could have been, and probably should be, reviewed in the Journal of Asian Studies' China section as well as in the Southeast Asian section. It belongs on the must-read list of every scholar who works on China and/or northern mainland Southeast Asia before the tenth century. The book is a meticulously detailed study of the peoples who lived between the Red River and the Pearl River from approximately the third century through the eighth. This geographic space is now divided between the People's Republic of China and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. This positioning of the peoples who are her topic shapes and informs Churchman's approach to the subject of their history. She clearly and repeatedly makes the point that the peoples who are the focus of her book have been, at times, ignored by scholars because they don't “fit” into the standard straight-line narrative of either Chinese or Vietnamese history. Churchman makes an even stronger argument that, when they were not ignored, these peoples were co-opted into nationalist histories of both China and Vietnam by reading the evidence about them with an agenda to make them seem “more” Chinese or Vietnamese than they could possibly have been.

The People Between the Rivers is divided into seven chapters and brief, but pointed, introductory and concluding sections. The text is augmented by six well-done and pertinent maps, notes on the author's choices in terms of transcription and reference systems, a table on population, a few other reference materials such as a list of Chinese dynasties during the period under discussion, an absolutely magnificent glossary, and the usual bibliography and index. One of my few criticisms of this book is that, for a book with such a wealth of detail, the index is not nearly as extensive as it should be.

The first three chapters essentially form a section in which Churchman defines the peoples who are her topic of study by reinterpreting virtually every previous scholarly attempt to utilize the varied types of evidence on them that exists. While I have described her approach as reinterpreting, perhaps debunking would be a more appropriate description of the tone that Churchman takes. She utilizes a broad and diverse array of primary and secondary sources from numerous disciplines—archaeology, biology, chemistry, ethnography, geography, history, linguistics, metallurgy, numismatics, and more.

Churchman's vision is to present the peoples between the rivers on their own terms to the extent that is possible at this far a remove in time. To that end, chapters 4, 5, and 6 examine, respectively, “traditions of leadership,” the repeated military contact that successive Chinese states had with the peoples between the rivers, and highland-lowland trade relations.

Chapter 7 introduces several families, and individual family members, who had both enough might within their own polities and enough contact with the Chinese to have left a reasonable mark in the textual record. Churchman presents a sophisticated appreciation of political and economic agency on the part of the bronze drum–making peoples between the Red and the Pearl rivers. She also makes it clear that, although the drum makers in what is now Vietnam have gotten more press in the last 100 years, those who made the Heger II type drums in what is today China were a force to be reckoned with in their own times and on their own terms.

Although the bronze drums produced by these peoples were clearly political markers, Churchman's presentation of the bronze drum centers is so permeated by environmental, linguistic, and ethnographic information that one comes away from reading this with a vivid physical image of these peoples and life in their settlements. In other words, for a work of such monumental scholarship this is a very readable book. It could certainly be used in graduate seminars, and even upper-level undergraduate classes, on ancient China and Southeast Asia.