Cultural interactions during the Zhou period (c.a. 1000-350 B.C.) : a study of networks from the Suizao corridor

This thesis concerns about cultural interactions during the Zhou period of China (c.a. 1000-350 B.C.) between the Suizao corridor (near the present-day Yangtze River region) and its contemporaries within or outside the Zhou realm. It mainly, but not exclusively, concentrates on bronze ritual vessels from the Suizao corridor, and discusses the underlying social and political relations between the dominant cultures and the regional ones in this particular area (the Zeng state for example), which are central to understanding the ways in which the dominant cultures joined their disparate territories into a whole. Newly excavated archaeological evidence show that there were at least three periods when people in the Suizao corridor learned about the current traditions employed elsewhere, which are: 1) Yejiashan period (from the 11^th to 10^th century B.C.); 2) post-Ritual Reform period (from the mid-9^th to mid-7^th century B.C.); and 3) Marquis Yi's period (from the mid-6^th to mid-4^th century B.C.). In these periods, local people in the Suizao corridor were involved in networks of enormous and constantly changing complexity, in which people, objects, practices, and ideas were mixed together through interregional contacts. The choices of local people in adopting foreign materials and ideas from either the dominant cultures or other places heavily depended on the subjective view of their social identity, which can be constructed, maintained, or transited to adapt to different social and political environments.