Quantifying the Funerary Ritual Activity of the Late Prehistoric Southern Kanas Region (Xinjiang, China)

Caspari, Gino (2020). Quantifying the Funerary Ritual Activity of the Late Prehistoric Southern Kanas Region (Xinjiang, China). ASIAN PERSPECTIVES: The Journal of Archeology for Asia and the Pacific, 59(2), pp. 421-452. University of Hawaii Press 10.1353/asi.2020.0020

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Identifying peaks in the anthropogenic activity of a landscape is an important starting point for understanding past social dynamics in the longue durée. Through intensive surveys and remote sensing surveys of the Heiliutan Basin 黑流滩大草原 [heiliutan dacaoyuan] in the southern Kanas Region喀纳斯 [kanasi], Xinjiang, China, a high resolution data set of over 4000 years of material culture is established. The complete coverage of the area of interest allows for the quantification of funerary ritual activity based on the number of constructed monuments per century. The data show that from the Eneolithic to the Late Bronze Age, the intensity of funerary ritual activity was very low and only left marginal traces in the landscape. During the early Iron Age (ca. ninth – third centuries B.C.E.) the basin becomes the focus of burial construction for social elites of nomadic tribes in the area and is rapidly transformed into a landscape of the dead. The following late Iron Age sees the decline of ritual activity in the basin, which effectively becomes an unimportant side scene of cultural developments in the wider region.

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