The Mace-head: A Significant Evidence of the Early Cultural Interaction between West and East

Abstract

The archaeological evidence available so far has revealed that the earliest mace-heads first appeared in the Near East about 10,000 BP. along with the early development and spread of agriculture. After that maceheads began to spread throughout the ancient world: southward to Ancient Egypt Kingdom in North Africa, and northwest to Europe and then to the Eurasian steppe of central Asia and Siberia. Eventually, this movement gradually arrived at the Northwestern region of China. In China, mace-heads were found only in Xinjiang, Gansu, Qinghai and Western Shaanxi in Northwestern Chine. In fact, the morphology of these objects is quite similar to those found outside China. The author assumes that maces, as they bear special and symbolic functions, are not the original or indigenous cultural trait of Chinese civilization. Instead, they are more likely to be exotic goods coming from out-side. The author argues the reasons can be summarized as follow: first, mace-heads in the Near East significantly predate all counterparts in China. Second, the amounts of mace-heads found in China are relatively limited. Third, mace-head discoveries in China are concentrated only in the northwestern area, a pattern explicitly indicating the Western origin of this type of artifacts. From the very beginning of the modern field of archaeology in China in 1921, the question of the origin of ancient Chinese culture has been a focus of academic discussion. For instance, Dr. J. G. Andersson (Fig. 1) initially considered the Yangshao Culture (4900–3000 BCE) as the earliest stage in the emergence of Chinese civilization (Andersson 1923). Later, under the influence of some western scholars, Anderson accepted the model that found Chinese culture as originating in the West. Subsequently, he focused on the northwestern regions of China in search of evidence related to the earliest stages of Chinese civilization (Andersson 1925). Li Shuicheng / A Significant Evidence of the Early Cultural Interaction 259 Fig. 1. Dr. J. G. Andersson Although the ‘Western origin theory’ of Chinese culture has been challenged and criticized from the beginning, there was not any study for a long time that sufficiently elucidated and pin-pointed the provenance of ancient Chinese culture given the scarcity of evidence. For many Chinese scholars during that time, the “western-origin theory” became a longstanding dilemma. Since the 1950s, numerous archaeological discoveries have rejected the idea of ‘Chinese culture coming from the West’ and Chinese scholars gradually have established the theory of ‘Chinese culture originating indigenously’ – in the main valleys of the Yellow River, also known as the Central Plains. To a certain extent, the dispute has even become a controversial question debated on the philosophical level. In fact, no regional culture has ever been completely isolated in the history of world. Archaeology has shown, irrefutably, that cultural exchange played a crucial role in the development of all ancient civilization even in their earliest of stages. Nonetheless, the ways in which cultural interaction was present may be varied dramatically: in some cases the interaction involves large-scale replacement, conquest, and subjugation, while in some other cases the interaction involves explicit assimilation. No matter how different these ways would be, cultural interactions always play an essential role in the development and evolution of human society, and ancient China is no exception to this rule. Since the 1980s, plentiful archaeological discoveries have supplied abundant data for the reconstruction of Chinese prehistory. These new finds have not only moved most Chinese archaeologists to abandon the theory that presumes the development of Chinese civilization was in the Central Plains, but has led to the realization that ancient Chinese culture had emerged through cultural interaction among different regions (Su 1997). Cultural interaction had developed gradually from inner to outer China and eventually fostered direct or indirect communication between Social Evolution & History / September 2018 260 East and West. In the last 20 years or so, a series of new archaeological finds in northwestern China have clarified the pathways, chronologies and scales of early cultural contact that took place along the ancient Silk Road (Li 2002). Among these miscellaneous finds, the mace head provides an important case study in our understanding of the East-West interaction. In 1986, the Department of Archaeology of Peking University and the Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology of Gansu Province discovered some fragments of stone mace-heads at several loci during the Hexi Corridor field explorations in Gansu Province (GPICR and SAMPU 2011). In the summer of 1987, during the excavation at Gangu’ya Cemetery of Jiuquan, Gansu, one boulder mace-head was uncovered in burial 44 (Fig. 2) (SAMPU and GPICR 2012). These important discoveries attracted my attention and drew me to further investigate this question.