Cultural Interactions during the Zhou period (c. 1000-350 BC): A study of networks from the Suizao corridor

‘Cultural Interactions during the Zhou Period (c. 1000-350 BC): A study of networks from the Suizao corridor’ examines cultural interactions during the Zhou period of China (c. 1000- 350 BCE) between the Suizao corridor (near the present-day Yangtze River region) and its contemporaries within or outside the Zhou realm. It concentrates mainly, but not exclusively, 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 corridor learned about the current traditions employed elsewhere, which are: 1) Yejiashan period (from the 11th to the 10th century BCE); 2) post-Ritual Reform period (from the mid-9th to the mid-7th century BCE); and 3) Marquis Yi’s period (from the mid- 6th to the mid-4th century BCE). In these periods, local people were involved in networks of enormous and constantly changing complexity, in which people, objects, practices, and ideas were mixed together through inter-regional contacts. The choices of local people in adopting foreign materials and ideas from either the dominant cultures or other places depended heavily on the subjective view of their social identity, which can be constructed, maintained, or transited to adapt to different social and political environments.