What makes us different is what makes us human..
Origins of Complex Societies in Inner Mongolia
It is reassuring that all the pseudo-population graphs [for the Chifeng survey area] illustrate broadly similar patterns. This rather remarkable similarity suggests that the principal source of the variability all the graphs depict is, in fact, changing ancient population levels, not sampling vagaries and biases or the impact of dubious assumptions. (Drennan et al. 2003:156)
Drennan, Robert D., Christian E. Peterson, Gregory G. Indrisano, Teng Mingyu, Gideon Shelach, Zhu Yanping, Katheryn M. Linduff, and Guo Zhizhong)2003 Approaches to Regional Demographic Reconstruction. In Regional Archeology in Eastern Inner Mongolia: A Methodological Exploration /. Beijing: Science Press.
"Systematic" collecting has come to refer in archeology to the practice of carefully collecting all artifacts within a clearly delineated area. Such a procedure reduces sampling bias because survey crews exercise no judgement about what to collect and what not to collect, and because artifacts whose characteristics make them inconspicuous are less likely to be overlooked when the ground surface in a small area is examined very carefully. Although such techniques have been used in many contexts, large-scale regional surveys are often carried out without systematic collection because the practice is thought to be too time-consuming to be practical on this scale. In Chifeng, however, we have found making systematic collections eminently practical. Two members of a survey crew can mark out a circle 3 m in diameter very quickly. (One stands still holding one end of a 1.5 m rope while the other holds the other end and walks around in a circle making boot marks on the ground.) All artifacts within the circle are collected (it usually takes less than ten minutes). If fewer than 20 sherds are found, then additional adjacent circles are collected until the minimum sample size is achieved, and the total number of circles serves as a record of the area within which the systematic collection was made so that the average number of sherds (or artifacts of any kind) per m2 can be calculated. (Drennan et al. 2003:137)
Drennan, Robert D., Christian E. Peterson, Gregory G. Indrisano, Teng Mingyu, Gideon Shelach, Zhu Yanping, Katheryn M. Linduff, and Guo Zhizhong)2003 Methods for Archeological Settlement Study. In Regional Archeology in Eastern Inner Mongolia: A Methodological Exploration /. Beijing: Science Press. (Clinton Corners, NY: Eliot Werner Publications)
For Chifeng, the separate peaks rising from the flat plane in the unsmoothed surface reflect the well-defined small local communities visible on the modern landscape. Even where these communities are most numerous and most closely spaced, they remain separate and identifiable. Social, political, and economic interaction is today strongly focused within these communities, where the local representatives of larger scale political organization are found, within which land tenure and agricultural production are organized, and where specialized production and exchange take place. Residents of these small local communities are bound together in relationships of economic interdependence through a vigorous commerce in local goods and services including farm produce, repairs to industrially produced goods, and even restaurants. For the Alto Magdalena, on the other hand, the unsmoothed modern occupational surface, much like the Regional Classic period one, has a multitude of tiny separate spikes, which represent individual farmsteads. The kinds of interaction that produce the Chifeng community pattern are absent or attenuated. Land ownership and the organization of agricultural production are not community functions but instead are centered in individual households. Modern political authority has effectively no representation at this very local level in the Alto Magdalena, in sharp contrast to Chifeng. And small-scale local commerce is very poorly developed. . . . There is no reason to suppose that these principles are any less applicable in prehistory than in modern-day rural China or Colombia. (Peterson and Drennan 2005:23)
Christian E. Peterson and Robert D. Drennan2005 Communities, Settlements, Sites, and Surveys: Regional-Scale Analysis of Prehistoric Human Interaction. American Antiquity70:5-30
The Chifeng Region of NE China provides an opportunity to study a trajectory of societal change that contrasts with that of the Central Plain that has so strongly dominated thinking about prehistory and early history in all of East Asia. This thinking has emphasized the dependable high agricultural productivity of the Central Plain in the precocious emergence of social complexity and the eventual development of expansionistic states that forged empires of immense scale. The Chifeng Region is cooler and drier than the Central Plain—enough so that the climatic fluctuations of the past ten thousand years could have created periods of quite marginal agricultural production. (Linduff, Drennan, and Shelach 2004:48)
Linduff, Katheryn M., Robert D. Drennan, and Gideon Shelach 2004 Early Complex Societies in Northeast China: The Chifeng International Collaborative Archaeological Research Project. Journal of Field Archaeology 29:45–73.
As we look at the increasingly smoothed surfaces [of the Chifeng Hongshan occupation], we … see the emergence of spatial structure at a larger scale. At a power of 2, small basal flanges begin to appear around the occupational peaks. These broaden at a power of 1 into distinctly funnel shapes which might help us define the more inclusive clusters … [we] take as communities as well, in the same social interaction sense as we have used the word "community" before, but at a larger scale than the small local communities already defined.
Peterson, Christian E., and Robert D. Drennan2005 Communities, Settlements, Sites, and Surveys: Regional-scale Analysis of Prehistoric Human Interaction. American Antiquity 70.
These [Lower Xiajiadian] hilltop fortified sites tend to be much smaller in area and to have extremely low densities of surface ceramics despite ideal surface collecting conditions. Their cultural deposits tend to be shallow, but the architectural remains (often quite visible on the surface) include the stone foundations of circular structures, large terraces, massive walls and gateways, representing a major investment in construction.
Katheryn M. Linduff, Zhang Zhongpei, Gideon Shelach, and Robert D. Drennan. "Regional Lifeways and Cultural Remains in the Northern Corridor: Chifeng [China] International Collaborative Archaeological Research Project." Paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the Society for East Asian Archaeology, Durham, England, 2000.Robert D. Drennan
Robert D. Drennan (Professor) received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1975. He is an archaeologist whose interests focus on the origins and development of complex societies (especially chiefdoms), regional settlement pattern studies, and household archaeology.
His principal methodological specialty is quantitative data analysis and computer applications.
He does fieldwork in China, Mesoamerica and northern South America.