HORSEPOWER
Interactions between China, Mongolia and the steppe 2000-0 BCE
A Metal in the Horsepower:
Stories Behind the Research
By: Limin Huan
Limin Huan is currently a postdoc researcher in the Horsepower project team and the Leibniz-Zentrum für Archäologie, Germany. In 2023, his book, titled “How Leaded Bronze Transformed China, 2000-1000 BCE”, was published by BAR Publishing. The book is based on Limin’s DPhil research in Oxford from 2018 to 2022. Following its publication, the book was recommended by Antiquity’s New Book Chronicle (Uckelmann M. New Book Chronicle. Antiquity. 2023;97(396):1642-1650. doi:10.15184/aqy.2023.169). This article is about the stories behind Limin’s book, his previous research, and his visions of the current project.
Figure 1: Simuwu ding.
This bronze vessel was discovered in Anyang, the former capital of Shang (c. 1250–1046 BCE). Photo credit: Limin Huan.
What is this book about?
Regardless of its specific title, my book is actually about a quite general question: how did people in China begin to use metal? Metal was a crucial material in human’s early history. The use of metal, such as bronze and iron, symbolises not only great technological achievements but also profound cultural and social changes. When talking about the Bronze Age and Iron Age in Britain, we immediately think of those chiefs and warriors with armours and swords, and buried treasures.
In early China, there was a different version of the Bronze Age. Although most researchers nowadays believe that people in East Asia learned metal technology from the west (Central Asia and the steppes), the material was used to make a group of very special objects, the ritual vessels. These are food and drinking vessels which people used in certain ritual ceremonies. So the question is, why did people use the same material for a very different purpose? How did this tradition emerge?
Figure 2: Dayu ding.
This is one of the largest bronze vessels produced in the Western Zhou period (c. 1045–771 BCE). Photo credit: Limin Huan.
This is how leaded bronze, as the topic of my study, becomes related. Leaded bronze is bronze (copper and tin) mixed with lead. Many bronzes produced by early China used this material, while the same material was not common in the Bronze Age of other regions. This contrast have been noticed by researchers for decades. However, there is still no good explanation. In my view, answering this question may open a door to understanding the particularity of the Chinese Bronze Age.
Figure 3: The use of leaded bronze across Eurasia by the FLAME project, Oxford. The colours show that sites in East Asia usually had most objects made of leaded bronze, while objects from other regions were usually made of unleaded bronze. Photo credit: Pollard et al. 2018.
Therefore, in the book, I explored several early metal-using communities in China. By comparing their accessibility to raw materials, choices of metal technology, and social dynamics, I suggest that using leaded bronze was not merely a technological choice. Behind the success of this material are two main factors. One is the exchange between China and the steppe regions, driven especially by the imbalance in the distribution of certain resources (such as metal mines). The other is the diversity in the social and cultural backgrounds of the metal-using communities. These diverse backgrounds often led to either accepting or rejecting a certain technological choice.
Figure 4: Distribution of the three main metal elements used for leaded bronze: copper, tin, and lead. As the map shows, tin, a critical element of bronze, was rare in northern China and the steppe frontier. Map credit: Limin Huan.
Is there any “light bulb moment” in this research?
There certainly is. As many of my peers have suggested, archaeometallurgy (the study of past use and production of metals) is not purely about the physical and chemical properties of the materials. After all, the invention and adoption of any technology are cultural phenomena rather than pure scientific choices. How to understand this “human” part of technology was a question to me throughout my research. For these years, I always tried to “empathise” these metals through analyses, experiments, and sometimes just looking at them.
Figure 6: Some mineral specimens on my desk. I often looked at them and think why people were attracted by them at the very beginning.
Figure 5: Crushing the copper ores in the experimental archaeometallurgy workshop, 2019 (host by Peking University, China).
My light bulb moment is when I read a book called Doing Cultural Studies: the Story of the Sony Walkman (du Gay et al. 2013). It was at first a casual reading—a retreat from archaeology. However, I then realised that this case study of a small step in our recent history may answer some of my questions. The objects in this and my case are both fancy, but their popularity were both due to profound cultural and social reasons.
Following this idea, I moved my focus from metal objects to the communities that used and produced the objects. For a case study like the Sony Walkman, its contexts—such as the post-war globalisation, baby boom, and transculturation—are still fresh to researchers. For an archaeological case, nevertheless, researchers need to decipher the contexts by various other methods, from the demographic patterns of the burials to the reconstruction of human diets. When I tried to put metallurgy back into these cultural and social contexts, a new picture started to reveal itself to me. I saw that there was not just a single story of people in early China embracing leaded bronze. Different groups of people actually made different choices. Some introduced this material together with the whole leaded bronze industry, while others used this material for totally different purposes. Some people even chose to be “lead-free” by rejecting this new material. To me, to be able to see such human patterns and diversity is always something fascinating in archaeology.
Figure 7: Early metal-using communities studied in the book.
Map credit: Limin Huan.
Any ideas for your future research in the Horsepower project?
I am really happy to join such a wonderful research team with this wonderful topic. One of the aims of the project is to approach how the exchange of two crucial resources—horse and metal—contribute to the social dynamics both in China and on the steppe. With my previous study, I wish to explore more interesting aspects of the past societies through the lens of metal.
Meanwhile, the project is also an exciting challenge to me, as I now need to learn and use methods beyond archaeometallurgy. My goal is to understand how people lived in the middle ground between the two “worlds”—China proper and the steppe. As our project member Jessica Rawson has shown in her recent book Life and After Life in Ancient China, people in this middle ground hold the key to our understanding of the two seemingly more obvious worlds. In my research, I would like to explore the lives, beliefs, and self-perceptions of these people by studying their building constructions, burial rites, and material cultures. I will also use some scientific methods and tools, such as computer-based GIS (Geographic Information System) and statistics, to assist my research.
Figure 8: Book cover.
Book:
Huan Limin. How Leaded Bronze Transformed China, 2000–1000 BCE. Oxford: BAR Publishing, 2023.
References
P. du Gay, S. Hall, L. Janes, H. McKay, and K. Negus. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. Culture, Media, and Identities. 2nd ed. London/Milton Keynes: SAGE published jointly with Open University, 2013.
A.M. Pollard, P. Bray, P. Hommel, R. Liu, J. Pouncett, M. Saunders, P. Howarth, et al. Beyond Provenance: New Approaches to Interpreting the Chemistry of Archaeological Copper Alloys. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv7xbs5r.
Jessica Rawson. Life and Afterlife in Ancient China. London/Seattle: Allen Lane/University of Washington Press, 2023.