Naomi Standen (Newcastle University, UK) and Gwen Bennett (Washington University in St Louis, UK)

In this paper a historian and an archaeologist seek shared understandings of interactions between economically, socially and politically varied groups in a region that could support both pastoralism and agriculture. We find that while Chinese historical materials can permit detailed comment on the borderland interactions of, say, the Liao dynasty in the tenth century, these materials are limited in two ways: by their construction of the possibilities for borderland action and identity in terms of an antagonistic relationship between steppe and sown, and by their focus on ruling and literate elites.

Modern historians have embraced certain discourses in later historical texts to focus on the ‘imperial centre’ and emphasise the differing economic, political and cultural orientations between regions and peoples, perpetuating the notion of sharp boundaries rather than transition or buffer zones. Archaeological approaches in China have been largely text-driven, so reinforcing the emphases on elites and on sharp cultural distinctions. The arrival of systematic regional full-coverage survey methodologies in China offers possibilities for finding evidence for the experiences of a wider social range, but also raises the problem of incommensurate timescales.

In the texts, the contours of specific examples emerge within a century or three, but archaeological timescales are longer than this. CICARP, the Chifeng region systematic full coverage archaeological survey, has used recovered pottery sherds to map changing settlement patterns across a 7000-year time span. However, the utilitarian unglazed black wares of the 900-year period designated as Liao cannot yet be fitted into a chronological framework and render a conflated view of the Liao which includes all the societies leading up to it. We now have the lengthy and onerous task of establishing the pottery chronology for this region.

Historical approaches to the Liao would benefit from the archaeological imperative to think about particular locations over longer periods of time. Archaeological methods will enable us to ‘get local’ in the Liao borderlands in ways so far only achieved for later periods and primarily in the Yangzi valley. In doing this we hope to pick up patterns of change among non-elites, where both are invisible in the histories.

This is, for China, a very new kind of archaeological approach. Compared with tombs full of fabulous objects, regional survey and unglazed grey ware bend less obviously to the political and economic agendas that affect Chinese archaeology as a national project. If this archaeology reinforces the textual arguments for seeing the Liao borderlands as ‘open’, that will be further reason to consider to what extent, and for how long, a similar regime operated in the polities of the Central Plains, southern neighbours which were intimately engaged with the Liao, and even integral parts of the same borderland zone. Our goal is to bring both under the same framework of historical and archaeological analysis, that we might test the notion, measure the significance, and trace the development of the borderland not as margin or periphery, but as the location of influential structures and historical agency.