Qijia and Erlitou: The Question of Contacts with Distant Cultures

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationships between the Early Metal Age cultures of the Inner Mongolia and Gansu-Qinghai area with the Erlitou culture of the Central Plains region, and addresses the issue whether specific metal objects characteristic of these cultures may have their source of inspiration in areas as remote as southern Siberia and present-day Afghanistan and southern Turkmenistan. The proposal that China at the very beginning of its Bronze Age may have been affected by long-distance cultural transmissions depends upon recent reevaluations of the early history of the Eurasian steppe, in particular the advent of nomadic pastoralism and horse riding, and upon newly recalibrated carbon dates ascertained for specific Siberian sites and for the Bactrian-Margiana complex.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 125 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.