This research understands the characteristics of the regional and local political economy utilizing an intensive form of rice agricultural technology during the Middle Bronze Age (800-400 BCE), in the central western Korean Peninsula, focusing on how social components (e.g. regional polities, local communities, and individual households), in the context of emergent complexity, were related to each other in shaping a specific sociopolitical organization that utilized improved technology for primary agricultural production.
Relevant information has been generated by reconstructing MBA regional settlement patterns through the use of surface survey and excavation data, analyzing the spatial correlation between regional settlement hierarchy and differences in abundance of rice soils, the necessity of cooperative water management, easy accessibility to important junctions of ancient transportation routes, and investigating household wealth/status variability.
All of this information is used to place MBA society somewhere in the sociopolitical continuum, two ends of which correspond to the extreme top-down and bottom up systems, respectably. The top-down models assume that suprahousehold-level organization and management of labor-pooling necessary to utilize intensive agricultural technology, while bottom-up ones emphasize the individual households¡¯ and/or small kin-based groups¡¯ role in initiation and maintenance of the system.
I conclude that there was a mixture of the two strategies mentioned above, in MBA rice-agricultural intensification, rather than the consistent compatibility to either strategy. Communities within individual polities were organized differently indicating compatibility with either system, sometimes in substantially different manners. Even when comparing polities located in quite similar environmental settings, there were quite noticeable differences in production and distribution of wet rice.
In this light, beyond simple positioning in the continuum on the basis of reconstructing the differing levels of social organization, this study attempts to make such a reconstruction more dynamic by emphasizing the possible strategies pursued by different social actors, especially elites who are likely to get more benefits from the intensive agricultural systems. A possible strategic activity subjected by elites is feasting. The rigorous participation of commoner households in the intensive production of wet rice is observed at certain center and it may have been encouraged and compensated by feasting activities.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-07282005-202540 |
| Date | 05 October 2005 |
| Creators | Kim, Bumcheol |
| Contributors | Marc P. Bermann, Robert D. Drennan, Olivier de Montmollin, Katheryn M. Linduff |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-07282005-202540/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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