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Research
China and the steppe: reception and
resistance
Jessica Rawson∗
Study area
Beijing
0 km 2000
N
The development of several key technologies
in China—bronze and iron metallurgy
and horse-drawn chariots—arose out of the
relations of central China, of the Erlitou
period (c. 1700–1500 BC), the Shang (c.
1500–1046 BC) and the Zhou (1046–771
BC) dynasties, with their neighbours in the
steppe. Intermediaries in these exchanges
were disparate groups in a broad border
area of relatively high land around the heart
of China, the Central Plains. The societies
of central China were already so advanced
that, when these foreign innovations were
adopted, they were transformed within
highly organised social and cultural systems.
Keywords: China, Eurasian steppe, bronze, gold, iron, chariots, innovation, mass-
production
Introduction
The peoples on China’s borders and beyond, the mobile pastoralists of the steppe, have
traditionally been described in derogatory terms based upon comments in the early histories
of the fourth to first centuries BC (Di Cosmo 2002: 97–104). A project at the University
of Oxford’s School of Archaeology has worked with a different perspective, namely that
China’s societies and culture were stimulated and enriched by contact with the borders
and the steppe. Ongoing research has examined metal chemistry (Hsu et al.2016)totrack
material transfers across the Eurasian steppe to China; and it has followed river routes within
China and along mountain corridors in eastern Eurasia (Frachetti 2012). Above all, the
research has focused on the conditions that enabled the movement of materials and ideas
into central China and those that inhibited them.
The China discussed here comprises the lower Yellow River and the valley of the Wei,
known as the Central Plains. Over the first millennium BC, central Chinese culture was
extended to the northern bank of the Yangtze. One major conclusion is that, although
∗Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford, 34–36 Beaumont Street, Oxford OX1 2PG, UK (Email:
jessica.rawson@merton.ox.ac.uk)
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antiquity 91 356 (2017): 375–388 doi:10.15184/aqy.2016.276
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Jessica Rawson
some essential technologies and ideas were introduced from the steppe, such as metallurgy
and the management of horses (first for chariots and later for mounted warfare), these were
developed in ways completely unlike such practices in their places of origin. By the third
millennium BC, the inhabitants of central China had already established complex societies
and were only attracted to materials from outside if these could be adapted to fit their
well-embedded customs. This is the major reason why the features of what we call Chinese
civilisation differ so markedly from the more traditional descriptions of ‘civilisation’ based
on developments in the Near East or later in Europe.
Central China and the steppe were inevitably linked in combat and exchange. These
regions are often discussed independently of each other. Some scholars have postulated a
symbiotic relationship (Barfield 1989: 8–20). Others have concentrated on the penetration
of some steppe customs, particularly the chariot, into northern China (Wu 2013). As a
result of extensive excavation in the Russian Federation (Chernykh 1992; Kuzmina 2008)
and China (IACASS 2003), the relationship of central China with the steppe has generated
renewed study. The border area has also attracted a lot of attention (Linduff 1997: 18–32;
Di Cosmo 2002: 49–74). Surveys have identified typological similarities of weaponry across
the steppe and into the borders (Wu 2007;Yang&Shao2014).
The first steps towards an understanding of what contacts across this vast region meant
to China have been made in recent decades by scholars examining the ways in which cereals
(wheat and barley) and metals (particularly bronze and iron) came into the Central Plains
(Mei et al.2009; Jones et al. 2011;Li2015; Linduff 2015). The wider implications of
the importance of contact between Eurasia and China were drawn together by Andrew
Sherratt (2006: 35–36), who noted that, had this ‘Trans-Eurasian exchange’ not existed,
China might have remained as isolated from western Eurasia as the Americas were when
Columbus reached the islands of the Caribbean.
Geography: the arc and central China
Fundamental to this account are the environmental and social differences of three major
areas: the Eurasian steppe, the borderlands and central China, that is, the Central Plains.
Across many thousands of kilometres of the steppe, pastoralists and agropastoralists were
often mobile, at least seasonally, with varied practices of trade, ritual communication,
political negotiation, herding and exploitation of resources (Frachetti 2012). They also
sought wealth and power by forming alliances, breaking them to form new ones and vying
for allegiances with gifts that in themselves were also a means of spreading new materials
and technologies (Kuzmina 2008: 40–70; Honeychurch 2015: 73). The great ranges of
the Pamirs, the Tianshan, the Altai and the Sayan provided many regions rich in minerals
and forests that fostered metallurgy. To the north, the basin of Minusinsk was especially
favoured by mountains that sheltered its steppe and agricultural land (Legrand 2006).
Between the steppe and the Central Plains is a vast area of high land, desert, agricultural
basins and some northern forest zones, which Tong Enzheng called the ‘crescent-shaped
region’ (Lin 1986: 241–50; Tong 1987). Others refer to it as the Northern Zone, Northern
Frontier or Northern Bronzes Complex (Shelach 2009: 8, 28–30; Rawson 2015: 46–47).
With different names, the area is now receiving more attention. It can be regarded as
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China and the steppe
Figure 1. Central China and the arc (coloured grey, based on information on present-day herding practices) with sites
mentioned in the paper. Map by Peter Hommel.
extended in the west, southwards towards Yunnan. Here, we have adopted the term ‘arc’
to describe this zone as an area of independent cultural groups (Figure 1). The arc shares
with the steppe a climate generally less favourable for intensive agriculture than that of
central China.
This huge, geographically and ecologically diverse area was inhabited by many different
groups with varying material cultures. Three tendencies shared within the arc are relevant:
weaponry, tools and metal ornaments had more in common with those of the steppe
groups than with those of central China; bronze vessels, which were major products of
the Central Plains, were acquired by trade or looting and were sometimes copied (Rawson
forthcoming); a leaded tin-bronze alloy employed on the Central Plains was also widely
adopted.
The Central Plains, by contrast, had quite different geographical and ecological features.
A large territory, covered in the highly fertile loess blown from the north-west, nourished
millet and rice agriculture, with few large herds, and allowed more people to be fed on
the land than if it had been used intensively for pasture. This absence of herds, enabling
more potential growth in the human population, is a fundamental feature of the early
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Chinese economy that has not been explicitly recognised before. Long before the advent
of metallurgy in the second millennium BC, communities had been organised for large
projects, such as the construction of ditches, dykes and walls (Shelach-Lavi 2015: 127–60).
The favoured grains—millet and rice—had to be boiled, not ground and baked as with
wheat and barley in Western Asia (Fuller & Rowlands 2011: 46–51). One consequence of
the intensive farming of millet and rice was that all settled communities developed a wide
variety of fine ceramics for cooking and serving, and for rituals such as burial.
High levels of organisation were also fostered by the Neolithic ceramic industry in the
Dawenkou and Longshan phases (fourth to third millennia BC) (Underhill 2002: 63, 182–
84), and by the choice of jade and silk, both difficult to source and requiring specialised
skills to work. Sub-division of labour had evolved before the Shang dynasty (c. 1500–1046
BC), enabling mass production of very high-quality items for elites in markedly hierarchical
societies (Ledderose 2000; Shelach-Lavi 2015: 156–58). These were celebrated in elaborate
burials, especially in third-millennium BC Neolithic societies on the east coast, emphasising
the ritual roles of jade, ceramics and lacquer. The Shang and Zhou dynastic rituals that
followed focused not on a distant cosmos of deities, but on kin and their afterlife powers in
the here and now.
By contrast with these many sumptuous burials, those of the steppe and arc were limited
in number and content. Typical of the western steppe, the well-known graves at Sintashta,
east of the Urals, included weapons, ornaments and animal remains, as well as rare chariot
traces (Anthony 2007: 374, fig. 15.3). Burials in the arc at this early stage included ceramics,
some bronze weapons and ornaments (Linduff 1997: 22–25). Despite many local variations
and considerable changes in the first millennium BC, this basic division in tomb contents,
with the steppe and the arc on one side and central China on the other, driven by the
economies, roles and beliefs of their occupants, remained constant throughout the period
under discussion.
From the steppe to China
Two major phases of change in the late third and early first millennia BC, respectively,
generated movement across the steppe and had direct impact on central China. The first was
a long-term expansion of activity over the third to mid second millennium BC as increasing
mobile pastoralism, with wagons and metallurgy, spread across the steppe (Linduff 1998,
2015; Anthony 2007: 371–457; Frachetti 2012). The second phase, probably starting at
the beginning of the first millennium, was energised by widespread horse-riding. Here, the
hallmarks of contact that can be traced in the arc and central China are the use of iron and
gold, and motifs of animals, mainly in profile (Bunker 1993; Di Cosmo 2002: 56–87).
Although hotly debated in the past, today scholars generally accept that metal use entered
China as metallurgy, was adopted in the steppe and spread into the arc (Chernykh 1992;
Mei 2009; Linduff 2015). Some early metal finds in the arc (in the Hexi corridor and even
as far east as Chifeng) are only explainable as the result of several separate contacts with
peoples from different parts of the steppe (Linduff 1998). Much of this early metalwork
was of arsenical copper, smelted from an ore or achieved by adding arsenic to the copper.
Arsenical copper artefacts have been found in central China, but in general the peoples
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China and the steppe
Figure 2. Central China and the eastern Eurasian steppe with finds of spearheads with hooks typical of the Seima Turbino
Phenomenon, second millennium BC. Map by Peter Hommel.
there chose to work with tin-bronze, to which they added lead, as some earlier casters of the
Qijia culture in the Hexi corridor had done (Mei 2009: 10). Very high-quality tin-bronze
artefacts in the steppe may have developed as a consequence of the ores available in the Altai
Mountains. We do not fully understand this sudden emergence of excellent metalwork,
which is known as the Seima Turbino phenomenon (Chernykh 1992: 190–234). We do
know, however, that it had a clear impact on China, as illustrated by a spearhead type with
a projecting hook below the blade, originating in the Altai area, which was imitated, often
in massive sizes, on the Central Plains (Figure 2). The repeated discovery of this unusual
weapon shape in China is evidence of links with the eastern steppe (Mei 2009:fig. 3).
Following the initial impetus that brought metallurgy from the steppe into the arc
and then into the Central Plains, three innovations in central China illustrate concurrent
reception and resistance to this introduced technology: bronze used for vessels rather than
primarily for weapons; warfare conducted with steppe chariots but without individual elite
combat weaponry; and jade weapons in burials, replacing the personal bronze daggers and
knives buried with peoples of the steppe. All three distinguish early Chinese societies not
only from those of their neighbours but also from those of the Near East.
The major Central Plains site at Erlitou, with elite structures, workshops and tombs,
has provided evidence of the first shift towards using bronze in an entirely local context c.
1700–1600 BC (IACASS 2003: 61–139). Although casters continued to make some objects
derived from models used in the steppe and arc (Shelach 2009: 128), two developments
drove bronze-casting in new directions. Complex ceramic moulds were developed to cast
vessels based on the ceramic prototypes already mentioned, and lead was added to the alloys
to ensure that the metal flowed well into elaborately shaped and decorated forms (Figure 3).
The late Shang and early Western Zhou (twelfth to ninth centuries BC) vessels were of
extraordinary size, with the largest surviving vessel weighing 875kg. Sets of numerous
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Figure 3. A group of cast bronze vessels, Shang period, twelfth to eleventh century BC. Reproduced with permission of the
Trustees of the British Museum.
bronzes for ritual banquet performances required immense efforts in mining, smelting,
transportation, mould-making, casting and finishing (Figure 3). As bronzes were buried
in tombs, new vessels were continually commissioned. The high levels of skill and the
massive scale of labour and materials required for the bronze industry were driving forces in
expanding the numbers of Shang centres, as well as elaborating extensive networks for the
acquisition of resources, such as copper or ivory from the south and, later, horses from the
north (Cao 2014: 198–205; Rawson forthcoming).
When the Zhou, a group from the north-west, defeated the Shang in 1046 BC,
they employed modified forms of Shang bronze vessels in ritual offerings and burials
to establish their legitimacy and to expand their power base. All the evidence shows
that, in the hands of the Shang and Zhou rulers, when metallurgy from outside was
embedded in the Central Plains, it became a major instrument in enhancing Neolithic
forms of ritual and thus entrenching ancient expressions of power that were unique
to China.
The chariot appeared at the Shang court in the thirteenth century BC. Both the vehicle’s
form, with large spoked wheels, and the paired trained horses must have been introduced
from the arc and the steppe, where they were first used east of the Urals in Sintashta, around
2000 BC (Kuzmina 2008: 49–59). Such a completely new machine almost certainly needed
steppe drivers and trainers for the horses, and we know that these were present at the Shang
centre at Anyang from copies of steppe weapons found in their tombs (Rawson 2015:fig.
13). These originally foreign chariots were, however, transformed for burial by the Shang
elite, being decorated with local, mass-produced bronze plaques and fittings to enhance
their ritual presence (Wu 2013: figs 2.2 & 2.19).
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Figure 4. Map of the eastern steppe and the arc showing the distribution of small swords or daggers along the arc. Minusinsk
Basin (a–e): a) Krivosheino (Andronovo); b) Potroshilovo (Okunevo); c) Krasnopol’e; d) Kaptyrevo; e) Chasto-ostrovsoke;
Mongolia (f–h): f) Galt, Khovshol Province; g) Battsengel, Arkhangay Province; h) chance find, Ömnögovi Province;
China (i–t): i) Tianshanbeilu, Xinjiang; j) Xuhaishuwan; k) Chaodaogou; l) Baifu; m) Nanshangen; n) Shaoguoyingzi; o)
Ningcheng City; p) Liulihe; q) Xi’an; r) Baicaopo; s) Baoji Zhuyuanguo; t) Chengdu. Map and drawings by Peter Hommel.
Both the Shang and the Zhou engaged in war with their northern neighbours, as testified
by oracle bones and bronze inscriptions (Li 2006: 141–92; Keightley 2012: 174–93). The
dynastic armies did not, however, adopt northern fighting patterns, which were based on
small-scale bands of men, attacking with axes, daggers, and bows and arrows (Yang & Shao
2014). Shang leaders carried huge bronze axes, derived from Neolithic jade prototypes.
Such heavy blades were not suitable for hand-to-hand combat and there was no celebration
of individual valour. The distribution of short swords and daggers mapped in Figure 4
shows that these were not taken far into central China in the Shang and early Zhou
periods.
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Figure 5. Symbolic jade weapons, or ge. Shang dynasty, twelfth century BC. Shanghai Museum; photograph by Jessica
Rawson.
Instead, from the Shang onwards, infantry armies were large, consisting of several
thousand men in the field. This number rose rapidly over the Western (1046–771 BC)
and Eastern Zhou (770–221 BC) periods to tens of thousands, and, eventually, hundreds
of thousands (Yates 1999: 26–27). Forces of such size, as with other cultural patterns
characteristic of the Central Plains, depended on a large population reliant upon raising
crops, rather than herding animals.
Objects made from jade, the material most valued by the ancient Chinese, illustrate more
subtle responses to the proximity and dangers of the arc and the steppe. Especially under
the Shang, pointed jade blades (Figure 5), mimicking bronze weapons, in many sizes and
with many different details, accompanied the highest elites in death. The dangers posed by
demons and spirits of the afterlife were sufficiently alarming to require defensive weapons in
jade rather than bronze steppe-style daggers—as jade was, apparently, accorded auspicious
powers.
The second phase of contact and exchange can be traced from the beginning of the first
millennium and intensified from the eighth century BC. Pressure from the north, which
led to the collapse of Zhou rule in the Wei Valley in 771 BC and the flight of the court
eastwards to Luoyang, probably resulted from increased competition and conflict in both
the steppe and the arc. Many groups had taken to horse-riding for raiding and warfare and
were, by then, using iron weapons (Di Cosmo 2002: 74–90; Honeychurch 2015: 109–56).
An increasing number of conspicuous stone monuments in the steppe requiring organised
labour, with burial of horse heads and installation of large upright stones, engraved with
deer and with steppe-type weapons, reflected these changes between 1400 and 700 BC
(Jacobson-Tepfer et al.2010; Jackson & Wright 2014; Honeychurch 2015: 112–22). In
the succeeding period, 700–400 BC, steppe leaders across an immense area from the Black
Sea to the arc were accorded massive burials under huge stone kurgans, along with elaborate
dress with gold ornaments, belts and iron weapons, and were accompanied by horses and
subordinate burials (Figure 6).
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Figure 6. The steppe and Central Asia with major Iron Age sites. Map and drawings by Peter Hommel.
A concurrent dominance of animal motifs has generally been identified as Scythian in
origin, but as the centre of the early development of the so-called ‘animal style’ was in the
Sayan Altai region, the term Siberian or Scytho-Siberian would be more appropriate (Di
Cosmo 2002: 32). Two tomb groups are especially relevant to developments in the arc and
central China: those at Arzhan in the Tuva, dating from the ninth to the seventh centuries
BC (Chugunov et al. 2010), and those of the fourth to third centuries BC at Pazyryk in the
Altai, where gold foil on wood was used, rather than solid gold (Rudenko 1970: pl. 120).
Certainly the speed with which gold, iron and animal motifs reached the arc is
astonishing. A lord of the minor state of Rui, buried in tomb M27, dating to the eighth
century BC, at a large cemetery at Liangdaicun near Hancheng on the Yellow River, must
have been a near contemporary of the individuals buried at Arzhan. Not only did the lord
have iron blades set in bronze as steppe-style knives, he also had the largest assemblage of
gold ornaments found so far on the edge of central China (Figure 7). The Rui lord also
had a jade copy of a Tagar-type dagger in an openwork gold scabbard (So 2015:fig. 3);
such daggers were popular in the Minusinsk Basin and, beginning in the eighth century,
appeared in many variations throughout the arc, with one example even buried in a Han
prince’s tomb at Mancheng, dated to the second century BC (Figure 6).
In the fourth to third centuries BC, steppe motifs and practices from the Altai, known
from the burials at Pazyryk, were transmitted enormous distances to Majiayuan in Gansu
Province and other sites in the arc (Figure 6). The occupants of the nearly 60 catacomb
tombs, as with their steppe contemporaries, wore gold plaques on their belts and curved
ornaments around their necks; their clothes carried masses of beads, and they were interred
with horse and cattle heads and hooves; none of these items figured in burials in central
China (GPICRA 2014: 58–63). Their elaborate chariots were decorated with small animals
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Figure 7. Suggested arrangement of gold from tomb M27 at Liangdaicun, Hancheng, Shaanxi Province, eighth century BC.
Drawing by John Rawson based on a sketch of the reconstruction shown at the Shanghai Museum, September 2012.
that were cut out of sheets of gold, silver or tin, and that closely resembled those in felt and
leather found at Pazyryk (Rudenko 1970: figs 108–115, 137; GPICRA 2014: 72–84). As
also seen at Pazyryk, the Majiayuan peoples took on Mediterranean motifs of palmettes and
running scrolls, introduced to the steppe from Western Asia (Rudenko 1970: fig. 72, pls
67, 79, 82, 143, 148, 152, 155C, 162; Stark 2012;GPICRA2014: 88, 92, 94, 104–106).
The speed with which the Majiayuan peoples borrowed practices and motifs from the
distant Altai contrasts with the resistance of the peoples of central China to adopting these.
Gold was used, but hesitatingly, and with a variety of experiments with gold foil, cast gold
vessels and fittings and gold inlaid inscriptions (Bunker 1993). Only for a relatively short
period in the Western Han (206 BC–AD 6) were exotic gold and silver items highly prized
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(Nanjing Museum 2013). Bronze and jade remained the materials of primary value until,
from the fourth century AD, Buddhism brought with it notions of jewelled and gilded
paradises.
Weapons from the steppe, especially the sword, do not seem to have radically changed
the tactics of war, despite having become fairly common by the sixth century BC. Some
soldiers must have carried swords and employed them in battle, but there is no evidence
that elite commanders engaged with swords in personal conflicts with their equals. Textual
accounts suggest that swords were more likely employed in suicide, ambush or assassination
(Rawson 2015: 70).
If, however, steppe sword-fighting and gold-ornamented dress from the sixth century BC
failed to make a strong impression in the Central Plains, iron, as bronze had before, met
important needs. Chinese bronze- and iron-casting was unique, with strongly controlled,
very high temperatures, which were not attained farther west for over a millennium.
Massive numbers of cast-iron tools enabled the central Chinese to move into more difficult
territories farther to the north and south (Wagner 2008: 115–70). An expansion of
agricultural land followed, and the rulers of the now divided Central Plains, in the period
known as the Warring States (c. 475–221 BC), pushed northwards, engaging in further
combat with their neighbours.
The arc and the rise of the Qin state
From the fourth to the third centuries BC onwards, the Chinese became conscious of the
distinctive cultural demands of the steppe. They therefore supplied their neighbours with
gold and bronze belt buckles and ornaments of a steppe style (Bunker 1993: 45–46). Silk
was sent north, and appears in the Pazyryk tombs (Rudenko 1970: fig. 17, pl. 178), but
while Chinese ritual vessels were also exchanged or captured by the peoples of the arc,
typical central Chinese bronze and jade forms and motifs did not, in general, find their way
through the arc to the steppe.
The people there, to a large degree, and certainly the inhabitants of the wider eastern
steppe, did not take up the major central Chinese innovations that had originally been
a consequence of stimuli from the north: namely, bronze vessel sets, chariot ornaments
in bronze and mass-production iron-casting. A fundamental reason for an indifference or
barrier to these practices was a difference in ideology. In central China, offering rituals with
complex bronze vessels for food and drink were linked directly to a belief in the power of
the ancestors, and placed attention on social and kin relations of the living world, not on a
distant cosmos. The ideologies of the arc and the steppe were not congruent, and although
we have little textual information on the steppe, we can suggest that there were interests in
heaven and animal spirits, ideas that later crystallised as shamanic beliefs.
In addition, large bronze and iron industries depended on a high level of organisation,
as well as on complex hierarchical societies that created the demand for numerous bronze,
and later iron, weapons and tools. The steppe and most areas of the arc were too sparsely
populated, with limited access to resources, such as grain and minerals, to provide both
the supply and consumption that drove Chinese industries forward. As a result, Chinese
technologies did not go north. Much of the movement of peoples and materials came
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from the north or north-west towards the south. The invasion of the Zhou into the
Wei River and the defeat of the Shang in 1046 BC, a battle that was fought with the
support of other outsider groups, is clear indication of the drawing power of the Central
Plains. And this movement towards the dynastic centres was repeated through attacks by
others, known as Rong, or Xianyun, into Zhou lands during the ninth and eighth centuries
BC, ultimately leading to the relocation of the capital to Luoyang in the east in 771 BC
(Li 2006: 141–92).
As the Zhou moved eastwards, their territory was gained by the aspiring state of Qin.
Yet, despite having taken over political centres in the Wei Valley, some early Qin lords were
buried in their home territory farther west, at Li Xian, in present-day Gansu. In the eighth
and seventh centuries BC, they interred sets of bronze vessels in accordance with central
Chinese tradition. At the same time, some of their bronzes were embellished with small,
three-dimensional animals typical of the steppe; numbers of gold ornaments, also typical of
the steppe, have been found both there and in the western Wei Valley (Michaelson 1999:
cat. nos. 1, 2, 8; So 2015:fig. 2). Over the following centuries, the Qin followed Zhou ritual
practices fairly closely, but from the fourth century BC, they returned to a more hybrid
combination of north-western customs in some of their tomb structures, while adopting
central China’s palace buildings (Shelach & Pines 2005: 216).
King Zheng of Qin (246–221 BC), who was to be the First Emperor (221–210 BC),
took material from many regions. As he unified the territory, he employed steppe cavalry
men in his army, as we now recognise from the terracotta warriors guarding his tomb
(Khayutina 2013: cat. no. 314), whose dress resembles that of the steppe leaders known
to the Achaemenids and Parthians (Curtis 2000: front cover), but he proclaimed his
conquest in the language of the Central Plains: Chinese. The First Emperor must have had
advisors who knew something of the seals, weights and measures of Central Asia and Iran
(Khayutina 2013: cat. nos 115–17), and also retained craftsmen who had mastered Western
technologies and cast bronze birds for his tomb in hitherto unknown life-like forms (Mei
et al.2014). He also exploited mounted horsemen and iron weaponry originally from the
steppe, and agriculture and settlements of the Central Plains, turning to the extraordinary
organisation of people and manufacturing from this area to create a unified state. This could
only be achieved by moving towards the centre, as the Emperor indeed did.
As the Qin moved south and east, as the Zhou had done before them, they adopted
central Chinese organisation. Later dynasties founded by outsiders did the same. Yet
even though northerners might take over as rulers of the Central Plains, the materials,
technologies and ideas that they brought with them were only embedded there when these
could be adapted to and integrated within the dense, highly organised, hierarchical societies
that had come into being long before the arrival of metallurgy from the west. As close
neighbours, the peoples of central China, the arc and the steppe were inevitably embroiled
with each other, but throughout their continuous engagement, their cultures remained
steadfastly distinct.
Acknowledgements
This research has been supported by the Leverhulme Trust Grant F/08 735/G for work by Peter Hommel,
Beichen Chen, Yiu-Kang Hsu and Rebecca O’Sullivan; the research has also been supported by the Reed
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Foundation and the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou. The author is grateful for suggestions and information
from Yuri Esin of the Khakassian Research Institute, Abakan, and for advice and information from Chris Gosden
and Robert Harrist.
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