 I'm delighted that we have, as a speaker, someone from the Center for Korean Studies. Jack Gapas-Bucci, UCLA, was a postdoc with the Center and is currently a lecturer with the Center. And this is Mark Yellis, obviously, who is going to be talking to us about Mortuary Ritual and Iron Age Korea, which is a topic that can be substantial crossover interest. So, thanks. So, as Rosemary said, my affiliation here is with the Center for Korean Studies. So, since I've been here, I've been mainly pitching my research at Korean historians, Koreanists, people trying to convey the significance of archaeology to people who are already interested in Korea. So, this is a really great opportunity and I'm very thankful for all of you for actually showing up for me to justify my existence to a bunch of archaeologists for once. So, I'm very excited to hear what you have to say, what questions you have. So, why should a bunch of archaeologists care about the Korean Iron Age and Mortuary Ritual in this period? Well, this is really a pretty significant period of social development on the Korean Peninsula. It's the span of time when we have the formation of the first complex polities or state-level societies on the peninsula. And all this seems to happen in a quite a restricted period of time about the 3rd or 4th century, beginning in the 2nd century and ending in the 4th century with the development of the first historical kingdoms on the peninsula. And it comes along with a host of other very significant social changes. We've got the emergence of a very visible elite class, a very complex web of competing regional groups, intensified contact with the Han Chinese Empire via its administrative commanderies on the northern portion of Korea, in Manchuria. And with this greater Chinese influence we have the development of new technologies, iron production, stoneware ceramics, a very broad reaching production and trading networks that encompass the entirety of the peninsula and also southwestern Japan. And although towards the end of this period in the 4th and 5th centuries we have the development of coherent political entities, the first historical kingdoms of Pekje, Silla, and then a number of smaller kingdoms known as Gaia on the southern tip of Korea. There's a real striking amount of diversity in the Iron Age, this period is prior to these state-level societies. There's a huge variety in the way different regions and communities mediated contact with China, different strategies of elite legitimization. So the peninsula in the Iron Age is really a great archaeological laboratory for studying state formation or secondary state formation. So anyone interested in that topic should definitely be paying attention to Korea, I think. But the Iron Age is also critical to modern Korean conceptions of identity and political legitimacy. And it's really been a key component in the nation-building enterprise that especially South Korea has been engaging in since the end of the Korean War in 1953. The Iron Age is really the bedrock on which much of Korean history is written. And in fact the name of South Korea, the Republic of Korea, Daehan Minguk, or just Han Guk, is literally the country of the Han, Han referring directly to these Iron Age cultures that developed in the 3rd century AD. So for these reasons the Iron Age has really become a focus of archaeological research and ancient history. But it really has resisted easy classification and there's very little agreement on some very fundamental topics like social structure, political stratification, culture contact, all these kinds of things. So today I'm just basically going to introduce the material culture with a focus on the mortuary remains, which is pretty much all we have for most of this period. And then focus on a few areas of concern, especially to Korean archaeologists. The reconstruction of social structure, political authority, and ethnic affiliation. And then introduce some new ways of looking at the mortuary data that I think can comment on this or throw this into question. So this is the area we're looking at. This is Korea. I'm going to be, my nose got very dark all of a sudden. That was fine, I'm alright. So I'm going to be focusing not just on Korea but also specifically Southeast. I'll be alright. You'll just see me squinting for a little bit. Perfect. Take five everyone. Technical difficulties. Perfect. I'm humbled by this treatment. Anyway, so yeah, again, this is the area I'm focusing on, not just the Korean Peninsula, but within that the southeastern portion of the peninsula. And this is a region collectively known as Yongnam or Gyeongsang. And it is defined very sharply by two mountain ranges. In the east we have the southern tip of the Tebek Mountains, which form a very sheer eastern coastline. And then the Sobek Mountain Range, which delineates Yongnam from the rest of the peninsula, forms quite a significant mountainous barrier between it and the rest of Korea. In the interior there's one very significant river system, the Nakdong River and its tributaries. And so this has led to generally rocky terrain with a few isolated pockets of flat alluvial plains that we see a lot of archaeological activity in. And this is also where the population concentrates in modern times too. And so for the purposes of the Iron Age, the relevant areas are two inland regions, Taegu Gyeongsan and Gyeongju in the north, and then two coastal areas, Kimhae and Busan in the south, and Ulsan on the east. And I'll be introducing the material culture from all these regions, but I'm also going to be focusing again even more specifically on Gyeongju, the Gyeongju Plain. Yeah, this has been the area of the most archaeological activity in the last 20 or 30 years. The Gyeongju Plain is supposed to be the heartland of the Shilla Kingdom, probably the most significant historical polity that comes out of the Iron Age and eventually goes on in the 7th century to defeat the other kingdoms in the region and unite the entire peninsula under one political framework. So it's been quite important for archaeologists for that reason. You can see from the picture there's quite a stark contrast between the flat river valley and the more mountainous terrain that surrounds it. And we have a large central plain, the Gyeongju Plain, and then a number of more isolated river valleys. And in each of these isolated river valleys we have at least one major cemetery site. I'm going to be looking at the entire span of the Iron Age, which encompasses two archaeological subdivisions in Korea, the early Iron Age and the proto-thrikeanus period. The early Iron Age starts at 300 BC, goes to about 100 BC or 50 BC depending on which diagnostic artifacts you prefer. And then in the proto-thrikeanus period from about 50 BC to 300 AD, this process of state formation and social change really accelerates and we see a corresponding shift in the archaeological data. Here's a few of the major sites from a few of the isolated river valley regions. So before I jump into actually talking about the archaeology, I think it's worth pausing and discussing a little bit about the practice of archaeology in South Korea. I think this chart really illustrates quite nicely first the rapid expansion in archaeological activity in the last 10 or 15 years or so, and also just how dominated archaeology is by salvage or rescue projects. The vast majority of digs are of this kind, and every year there's a few academic excavations sponsored by universities and then a number of government reconstruction projects designed for educational or tourism purposes. But yeah, the vast majority of what we have is from salvage or rescue archaeology. So our sample is very biased in favor of urbanized and developed areas in modern times, and until the 1990s the focus was really on highly visible or easily excavatable mortuary sites. These projects are chronically underfunded as you might expect, they're quite rushed, and as a result many basic field practices often don't get carried out. The first dig I worked on didn't do any sort of flotation or even simple sifting of excavated soil, and so a lot of smaller artifacts just are never recovered, and it's extremely rare that we recover organic remains of any kind, especially in Gyeongju. So although I'm talking about tombs and cemeteries, I've got no nice pictures of skeletons or coffin structures or anything like that. It's mainly just grave goods, and then the bare outline of a coffin. Here's an example of a fairly typical urban salvage project, open plan, excavation undertaken in preparation for the residential development of this area. Yeah, so this project and most projects in particular are dictated by the needs of construction companies rather than any sort of intellectual engagement with the archaeology, and it's very very rare that we get to uncover an entire site or even become aware of the full extent of any sort of zone of human occupation. Although when you're digging in areas like this it is trivial to get free Wi-Fi on your phone from unsecured hotspots of people living nearby. Yeah, so this limits naturally the sample of archaeology we have, but also my research in particular, it's very unlikely that I'll ever have a nice site of my own to excavate. I'm limited to joining these projects myself and also collecting published excavation reports data. So with all that in mind, let's look at the archaeology itself beginning in the early Iron Age, about 300 BC to the first century, 300 BC to 100 BC. So in the Bronze Age period just prior to this we had seen society coalescing, the population coalescing a bit more. We have large towns that are concentrated on low hill sides, they're fortified, quite large urban or sort of urban populations, but in the early Iron Age we don't find any sites like this. We have a very small number of villages made up of clusters of very simple semi-subterranean pit houses, and the artifacts mainly recovered from these sites in salvage projects are these ubiquitous, simple earthenware vessels with a prominent attached pottery rim. Much more common in the early Iron Age is the recovery of mortuary sites. Tomb clusters have been found in quite an abundance. Some of these seem connected to or very close to habitation sites. They seem to be largely unplanned grave clusters usually made up of wood coffin tombs, although some stone cyst tombs from the prior Bronze Age also survive. And even though we're talking about the Iron Age now, at least in this very early period the most common metal artifacts and tombs are bronze, nicely well-crafted slim bronze daggers, spears, dagger axes, and a wide array of these bells or rattles that you see on the right side of these pictures. And metal in general is still quite a rare grave good, and usually they're taken as indicators of elite status, prestige goods, and perhaps even a sort of shamanic political leadership role or leadership structure. Any iron we do find are warring states or Han Chinese finished objects, and there may have been limited smelting or reworking of iron on the peninsula, but we can't really say for sure yet. In addition to these attached rim pots, we also have a more specialized mortuary ceramic set, much smaller, more delicate red vessels or black burnished high-necked jars. As we move on into the proto-three kingdoms period, settlements become much larger. These are quite sprawling decentralized areas of human occupation. It sort of encompasses agriculture production, iron ceramic production, habitation areas, and of course cemetery areas. These are really patchworks of many different activities that seem to have developed organically over quite a long period of time. Both these sites were occupied for at least 300 years continuously. So this is a pretty well-known site of Indang in the Taekwook Gyeongsan region. The blue shaded areas you see are cemetery sites, and they're completely surrounded by dwellings, by production facilities, and then eventually a earthen rampart and other sort of defensive features. Hongseongdong, the site I showed a little bit earlier, seems to have started out as a small village in this area with an attached cemetery that grew over time to encompass production areas and then a much larger cemetery, and presumably a larger village too that was not recovered in the salvage project. We have the continuation of the coffin tomb tradition, but bronze really declines, and instead we have the adoption and rapid spread of Han Chinese style iron production. Forging and casting was taking place of agricultural and craft tools, and also a limited number of knives, swords, blades, spear blades especially. Instead of these bronze rattles, you have elaborately decorated daggers, and Han Chinese luxury goods such as these bronze mirrors on the right there. Ceramics change as well, probably under the influence of this iron technology that was coming from China, new high-fired wheel made pottery known as wajil, has quite thick pottery with a tile-like consistency, is produced in a fairly coherent mortuary set in tombs. Usually we find at least one of these fan-necked horn-handled jars, a smaller hourglass sort of vessel, and then a simple attached rim pot as well. Some sites also have, in addition to coffin tombs, jar burials for sub-adults, cremated remains of infants and children that do not usually contain any sort of grave goods, but they are usually associated with particular coffin tombs. One interesting aspect of tombs in this period, at least I think, is that we have fairly consistent types of objects throughout the entire region, but certain very rare objects like bronze mirrors appear in a very limited number of tombs, but they seem to have been used in a really diverse, the way they were used in rituals was quite diverse from side to side, from region to region. And so we have a site like Kyodong in the south, where the mirror was found in sort of a cache of other iron and ceramic objects, sort of similar to the way you might find them in a Han le long tomb in northern Korea, but we also have mirrors that are found placed inside the coffin underneath the head of the deceased, sort of an imitation of a much older Bronze Age custom. And then we also have tombs in the far south where genuine Han mirrors and then imitation domestically produced imitations, or in some cases imitations produced in Japan are found sort of arrayed around the corpse or perhaps sewn onto clothing. Some groups did incorporate mirrors into their rituals, but they don't seem to have cared about the objects themselves, but they were more concerned with the reflective properties of the material itself or refashioning broken fragments into pendants, necklaces, things like that. Here we have four very carefully small circular punch outs of larger intact mirrors that seem to have been worn as earrings and in some cases fitted reflective side out into pommels of swords and daggers. So the objects themselves aren't important, it's the metal and it's reflective properties that seem to be important to some groups. Other groups are actively incorporating them as whole mirrors in rituals. As we go on to the first and second centuries, into the proto-thrikindos period we have quite a fundamental shift in mortuary ritual. Instead of coffin tombs we now have chamber tombs, these are much shallower interments, much wider, and instead of a coffin that separates the body from the rest of the grave, now everything is interred in a shallow wood lined chamber. Everything is arrayed together so the locus of the ritual seems to be now the grave site rather than the preparation of the corpse and the movement of the corpse to the grave site. Elite tombs in this period are much more ostentatious and the focus is on the quantity of grave goods. Chinese luxury goods like mirrors decline, we don't see much of them at all, but instead we have huge amounts of finished iron goods in this tomb, it's Harari. We have the sort of meticulous arrangement of axe blades that the body would have been rested on top of. Towards the end of the proto-thrikindos period in the third and fourth centuries chamber tombs do persist, but they become much more regionally distinctive, and in particular in Gyeongju, we see an interesting mutation, chamber tombs become much more elongated and slender, and there's a focus on very regular arrangements of axes, excuse me, of spear blades and ceramic sets. There's also a dichotomy now in ceramics. All these ceramics are still these tile-like Wajil vessels, but we have simple storage vessels contrasted now with highly individualized, meticulously produced, more decorative platters, dishes, bowls with raised stands, lids, elaborate handles, and they seem to sort of form the core of a feasting or ritual vessel offering component to rituals that a lot of researchers have tried to connect to the Chinese Bronze Age practice of entering or using bronze vessels in mortuary ceremonies. We don't see any of these objects in non-mortuary contexts, and it seems like the industry that was building up around just the production of specific mortuary ceramics was becoming very prominent, and it was in fact even driving the way this technology developed and changed. So there's a great article by an archaeologist Yi Songzhu, and he studied the development of these simple globular storage vessels, and he suggests that it was the demand for these objects in tombs rather than anything else that created this new form that then spread to the rest of society, to habitation sites, to production areas. The late third and fourth centuries also when we see these enigmatic duck-shaped vessels, they only appear in the third and fourth centuries, they only appear in the Gyeongchi region, and then they abruptly kind of vanish and disappear. So I feel like I could just talk for a whole hour on duck-shaped pots, but maybe next time. And chamber tombs are also arranged more regularly in discrete cemeteries now, often completely disconnected from any other kind of village site or any other kind of human occupation, discrete cemeteries with a very regular, well-planned arrangement. Okay, so that's it for the sketch of the iron age, the mortuary material. How has this stuff been interpreted and put into a narrative of Korean history by researchers? Pretty much unfortunately for archaeologists, historians got here first. They've had their claws in driving the interpretation of the iron age, and archaeology still is essentially generally a sort of supporting evidence for historical models rather than something that could actually shape or change the way we fundamentally understand the period. And so we have two major texts that cover the iron age. The first is the Samguk Sagi. It was written much, much later in the 12th century, and it's a dynastic history of the Shilla Kingdom, long after the Shilla Kingdom itself fell. And it describes in the, from the 1st century BC to well through the 5th century, 6th century, a very strong centralized kingdom known as Shilla that had a very elaborate government bureaucracy, a military, yeah, a very strong, well-established territorial kingdom surrounded by other similarly developed kingdoms that were constantly fighting with each other. And if we look at the archaeology, this is really just completely anachronistic. There's no evidence for anything on this scale. And historians do acknowledge this, and although the Samguk Sagi still has a lot of influence, it's sort of fallen out of favor and what is replaced it has been usage of Chinese historical texts that are much more contemporary with the period. So this account of the Han in the Samguk Jur was written in the 3rd century, so roughly the same period when these archaeological features were being produced. And the account of the Han describes something called the Samhan, these three Han groups, Mahan in the west, Chinhan in the north, and Chinhan in the east, and Pyeonghan in the south. It's a very short account, so there's not really much we can extrapolate from it. It seems to have been politically decentralized. There was a loose hierarchy of towns and settlements. A single ruling township would have ruled over a number of smaller villages, and these villages themselves would have had satellite townships or even smaller habitation areas. So what historians have extrapolated from this is sort of a settlement hierarchy model where we have capitals surrounded by larger villages, surrounded by smaller habitation areas. And this has been mapped onto the archaeology and the cemeteries to suggest that the larger and more elite cemeteries must correspond to the ruling townships of the account of the Han, and the smaller cemeteries surrounding them in more isolated river valleys must then correspond to these smaller villages. The new evolutionary frameworks, and especially good old Elmen services, Banche tribe chiefdom state, are very prominent in interpretation of these polities. And so generally the Han groups and the archaeology are fit into the chiefdom stage. And then in the early Iron Age we have these chiefdoms that into the proto-3 Kingdoms period formed confederations of chiefdoms, and then these naturally developed into the first states like Shilla, like Pekche, like the Kaya groups. But all of this relies heavily on mortuary evidence, and so the way these sites are usually understood is in the construction of cemetery and regional site hierarchies. So trying to map this village hierarchy system onto the archaeology, and especially matching named historical polities to specific sites. So if you have a particular legal abrat cemetery, it will be named as the regional authority according to the account of the Han in that particular area. Grave goods, reconstruction of the technological expertise of the region, possible cultural similarities based on the stylistic qualities of artifacts, are also used as a way to supplement and fill in the gaps in this very piecemeal or very vague historical narrative. That is generally the place of archaeology. Although recently, at least from my perspective, I think the archaeologists are fighting back. Now that there's so much more archaeology than there is historical documents that... We're getting there. We're getting there. I don't mean to talk so badly about historians. Some of my best friends are historians. Yeah. So that is the state of research I think. I think that's a pretty fair assessment of what's going on in Iron Age studies. I think the archaeology of evidence, actually though, potentially can be used to sort of question or complicate this narrative and also can speak more generally to world archaeological problems. State formation is state, a valid category. How do states come into existence? I think the mortuary material can really complicate these issues. And the first aspect that I want to sort of zoom in on is looking at transitional tombs. So as I mentioned in the first and second centuries, there is a transition from coffin tombs to chamber tombs. And this seems to happen throughout the region in this period. It happens everywhere. It's fairly consistent. But it is important to note that the adoption process of graves was actually quite variable. So in the Gyeongju region in Sarari, we have initially coffin tombs that take on aspects of chamber tombs rather than the full replacement of coffin tombs with chamber tombs. So here we have a coffin tomb that is much more shallow and contains aspects of artifact display that would become characteristic of chamber tombs. Farther south, we have very unique chamber tombs that appear only in this region. Very wide, almost square chambers with a very random arrangement of artifacts within them. And then at other sites in Usan, chamber tombs do appear, but they coexist with coffin tombs until well into the 4th century, so long after these coffin tombs were supposedly out of favor or replaced. So this doesn't necessarily contradict the idea that the entirety of Yongnam was at a relatively culturally homogenous chieftain stage, but it does offer this caveat that there was a high degree of local variation, local autonomy in how and when these tombs were adopted. And a similar pattern emerges when we compare the uniformity of the entire funerary program at various sites. So how exactly can we do this? Well, I started by looking at tombs from the very end of the Iron Age, the 3rd and 4th centuries when you would expect a fairly uniform ritual to develop if a kingdom like Shilla was consolidating its power, if these regional confederacies were in fact becoming more politically linked into what would become Shilla. So some of the most ubiquitous objects we have in this period are very simple storage jars, shallow earthenware bowls, iron blades, swords, ring pommel swords or daggers, and then a wide assortment of iron tools, axes, forks, sickles, plows, things of that nature. So most of these objects appear in consistent spaces within the tomb. Storage jars are usually found at the foot of the corpse in discrete clusters of ceramics, and iron blades are found at the side at the waist of the corpse. And so at a site with a very codified, very consistent mortuary ritual, we would find these ubiquitous objects always in the same place. So what I did was I started to look at these cemeteries and the actual arrangement of these objects in tombs at various sites. I sort of created a database that recorded the exact location of all these common object types and at different sites in the region then applied a statistical measure of variation that allows us to compare artifact placement at different sites. I won't go into too much detail into this, but if anyone's familiar with Ian Boris's work in the Mediterranean, he was my starting point, his idea of mortuary variants, looking at how comparing actual mortuary practice to an ideal uniform modal value that you could then measure the actual degree of variation from, I applied that to artifact types. So at each site I can come up with a ubiquitous artifact and then a measure of how variable it is and then compare that from site to site. And so I did this for a lot of different sites. I spent a lot of time reading Korean site reports and entering data. It was a very dark period in my life. But I'm going to just talk about two sites today, two of the largest and most completely excavated sites where we have the most abundance of data, Hwang Seong-dong and Dokjeon-ni. These sites are located very close to each other in the Gyeongju Plain within 15 kilometers of each other. They both have a large number of tombs from this final Iron Age period. The slender Gyeongju style chamber tomb. So you'd think comparing the uniformity of practice to these sites that you'd have a fairly consistent ritual that this is clearly the same culture. These are both sites for communities that are going to be incorporated or are already incorporated into Shilla, into this early kingdom. I did not find much evidence of this. And in fact, at Dokjeon-ni for any object type I looked at, the variation was much more uniformity at Dokjeon-ni than Hwang Seong-dong. Everything was much more diverse in terms of placement, in terms of its use in mortuary ritual at Hwang Seong-dong. So the score that is produced from this statistical measure from zero to one site with a score of zero would be completely uniform. A site with a score of one would be completely diverse with no consistency. And so Dokjeon-ni has very low scores whereas Hwang Seong-dong has significantly higher scores. What else do I want to say? Yes, so at Dokjeon-ni tombs conform to a consistent template. And the only thing that varies is the degree of elaboration. So we do have tombs that would have only one iron spear and a couple of ceramic vessels, but we also have tombs that have a small number or a large number of spear blades and then a large number of vessels in this auxiliary chamber. We always find these rows of spears and these sets of later wajil vessels. It's very, very consistent throughout the cemetery. We can also observe this at a number of other cemeteries in Gyeongju. And we even see similar tomb elements like these rows of spears, like these feasting and display ceramic sets. And this may be just my imagination from having stared at these cemeteries for hours and hours and hours and hours, but there's an interesting sort of competitive, almost competitive aspect to the way these arrangements are created. As time goes on, they just become much more elaborate. So at Dokjeon-ni, we have a nice row of iron spears, but at the 4th century site of Kua-ri, we now have hundreds of spear blades arranged in an almost lattice pattern, a separate chamber for ceramics. And we see this pattern at a number of other sites. So at the very least, the degree of elaboration, the sort of pageantry or the amount of expense in funerals, and funerals is becoming much more pronounced over time. But if we go back and look at sites like Hangseong-dong, despite being very close, in fact, Hangseong-dong is much closer to Dokjeon-ni than is Kua-ri, or any of these other very elaborate sites. Yeah, sites like Hangseong-dong do not seem to prioritize rituals in the same way, and they do not seem to be engaging in this regional one-upmanship or imitation or consistent practice. Tombs are much more diverse, and there's really no coherency or generally agreed upon proper standard for what constitutes a burial. So a lot of researchers have tried to explain this difference, this observable difference in terms of political hierarchy, right? So the argument goes that the more wealthy and elaborate cemeteries like Dokjeon-ni, like Kua-ri are the elite centers, and that Hangseong-dong must have been a peripheral subordinate village or polity or something like that. I mean, this is plausible, but I don't think it's entirely supported by the mortuary evidence. If we look just simply at the wealth of tombs, if we look at simply the amount of iron objects, the amount of ceramics, and then the presence or absence of difficult to procure or produce objects like duck pots, like mirrors, like iron horse-riding equipment, there's really very little to distinguish Dokjeon-ni and Hangseong-dong. In fact, if anything, Hangseong-dong is more wealthy in terms of what it has in its tombs. So I don't think we can simply say Dokjeon-ni is more elaborate, therefore it is an elite cemetery. I don't think there's any sort of overarching political structure or hierarchy that is developed yet. What I think is actually going on is that although mortuary material does point to very strong cultural networks and a shared symbolic language, we have differing ritual priorities and differing levels of engagement with regional mortuary customs at individual sites. And I think the mortuary data is hinting at imitation and competition at a regional scale among certain groups in Gyeongju that but participation in this seems to have been, if not voluntary, then variably expressed. So I think this diversity and this lack of any evidence for an overarching political authority, even in this very late period, just before we have the Shilla Kingdom, really complicates the state formation narrative. How did these states come into existence? It doesn't seem to have been a simple process of chiefdoms gradually coalescing into one coherent political entity. So there's plenty of other issues that follow on from this sort of assessment. If there was no political coherency, how did these state-level societies eventually emerge? What was the role of China in this process? I haven't really talked much about what's going on in Han China. Is it the way some Korean, more nationalistically inclined researchers argue that the presence of Han China and the peninsula sort of retarded social development and until it sort of backed off a bit in the third century, that's when this explosion of new mortuary features comes into existence. What was China's role in either impeding or facilitating this process? Is this pattern repeated in neighboring regions in the rest of Korea, in southwestern Japan, or even farther north, closer to where the Han Chinese commandries actually were? What is the role of geography, access to rivers or mineral resources? How can recent non-mortuary sites contribute to this developing picture? What's the deal with duckbots? That kind of stuff. So I'm looking at all these questions now, but I think that is where I will stop talking for today. Thank you very much. Of course. Do you follow on your own questioners? I accept two. The first one, and both of them sort of going back to your description of Korean archaeology and sort of the background information. One is the administration of all these rescue excavations. Just looking at the pictures of excavations and looking at the graphs and knowing a thing or two about history, it looks really similar to the way it's done in Japan for a number of historical reasons. But I'm curious about exactly who is administering and taking responsibility for the rescue excavations. How is that run? That's my first question. It did ask me a few years ago, I could have told you very simply that there's the Central Government Administration, the CHA, the Cultural Heritage Administration within the Central Government. And so the ministers always send us regional government organs. It's a very top-down centralized administration of approval of construction projects and then the commissioning of surveys and the excavations if necessary. And then a sort of penalty for not finishing these excavations on time in the budget and not publishing them quickly. But recently, the last two presidents, even Bakun and Pakunin, have sort of complicated and changed things. And so what you may have noticed is, let's go back to the sort of ominous draw off. Yeah. Yeah, so it was ominous draw off after 2009. This was not with, this is a continuous downward trend as sort of government or student regulations prioritize construction, general economic downturn is all in very bad ideology. So I'm actually not quite sure what's going on. My other question is about those earliest iron tools that are coming in the early iron age. As you said, it's a bunch of Han finished objects. I'm curious, is there any presence of Yon cast iron as well? Yes, we've cast ironed axes from about the third 300 BC up there. Again, they constitute, pretty much the only iron we have put out here. Some, I don't know what you're going to guess. So a few sides with this attachment to pottery and very simple creative iron blades. So maybe they were engaging in smoothing on a limited scale or refashioning. That's, that was going to be my next question about refashioning, because I know we've seen in Japan sort of the re-use of re-chipping and re-grinding of cast metal from Yon is wearing such a similar phenomenon. I've changed it before you. I don't want to potentially turn it into myself. Yeah, I think it is very similar to what you just had. Okay, cool. How does it really react? Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. I have two questions. One is about the feasting collection. And that is, I know that you really know more to your evidence. But if there is any more evidence to help you answer this question, do you think that those feasting ceramic sets are for the dead, for the living, or for the deities? And my second question is, are there any shrines or sacred locations that somehow these cemeteries link to? Meaning, are these dead really for, are they all this kuchimaw really for the dead because they were there in the living's life? Or are they for the people? Or are they for the deities? I think in answer to your first question, it's largely to facilitate the feasting of the warriors that are living half the time, but they are not. Well, again, we have the stories jars and then the feasting stuff. The feasting seems to be happening at the time of this year. And then these objects are interrelated to, in addition to a number of other storage vessels contained food and things like that. But again, salvage archaeology, lack of money, no proper analysis of the contents of these. That's actually the reason. In answer to your second question, certainly in later periods, there's a very pronounced emphasis on mountain worship and holy and important sites on mountain sites. We don't have any, would you be able to recover anything from the Iron Age in relation to this? I don't think you know, I think that you could sort of nicely categorize as a ritual site to some kind of important ritual site or something connected to important areas. Well, like in the landscape, are these orient just the first place? Are these bodies, are they all orient, are they oriented towards sacred places? In the early Iron Age, they're orienting more on the contras of, usually the other side, usually the other side, they're following the contour of the hill. Moving the chamber tunes, they're more regularly spaced east-west. They're regularly arranged east-west in very regular patterns. And this is, in contrast, you're trying to work a bit north-south. So, yeah, I don't think... You're making a real statement against China then. That would be... Yeah, but I don't think they're being oriented particularly to, probably, natural landscape, natural landscape work. James? I have two questions about the data analysis. The first one is, and this is not a sample, this is not what your sample says, but how many variables do you end up incorporating in your... We'll be, we have two larger sites, so for any problem, close to 300 tunes each. And as you can see, a lot of these have hundreds of of objects inside them. Yeah. Yeah, in the analysis that I did on 200 burial cemeteries in central Mexico, one of the things I tried not to do was to assume that there was uniformity. So, I used regression analyses, cluster analyses, to try to see what might be repeated patterns. And one of the things I found in looking at your stuff, it looks like you have something going on here, is that there's multiple kinds of actions going on which might, rather than being thought of as a very mortuary program, which is how we've always thought of it, we might think of them as different kinds of rituals, and some of them take place in all the places, and some of them only take place in some of the places, and the cluster analysis and regression analysis let me see those. So, I actually had not thought of using the sort of modal variance approach, and since I'm going back to the data set and doing it again this year, I'll be in touch, because... We're talking about tentacles. I think in response to that, I will say that I didn't include it here, but I do have a lot of evidence for different types of activities, different types of things that are coalescing into this also bicarbonate protocol feature. Increasingly, ceramics seem to be part of, within a site, a nice hierarchy of, at least a different degree of... So there's a ritual set, and this could be elaborated on in a few different ways, and this was important within a site, so it's important to distinguish with ceramics how much better you are from people in the community. But ironing itself seems to be more incorporated into this original communication method, so there's this really fascinating ironing staff heads that we find everywhere in great elaborate tombs, and they're all roughly similar looking, but each site has its own mediums of great way of producing them. Some of them hold it on, these really cute things, others actually shape the iron into this fashion, so it seems like there's a concern with regional communication in contrast to certain aspects. I think you're right that I do feel more about... But that's exactly the kind of thing that I was able to pull apart, is that some things, actually in the one village I was working in, there are clusters under house floors, which make it possible to talk about them in terms of neighborhoods, and certain neighborhoods did things, and other neighborhoods didn't, but then there were things that everybody did, and then there were things that were done everywhere but rarely, and so I can begin to sort of think in terms of living practices, which is another way of getting outside of the historians' sort of lockstep policies, because they don't care about it, right? They haven't said anything about that, they haven't taken the oxygen of the drug. Alright, that's what we're doing. I have a question that leads a bit to that, and you've been a bit down on the way the doubt has been elected, and obviously the constraints have come in, and it's all about theology. You've led to that way, there are always the constraints of how good is the dating, for instance. So you actually have 300 barriers and you can actually see some sort of minor chronology within the artificial material that you're looking at, or are you going purely by a topology of the artifacts? Yeah, it's mainly based on technology and relative chronology rather than it's very less pretty equivalent standards or something like that. So are they collecting this material, they are now, and there's actually maybe I'm being a little unfair to the stated point, I think since the early 90s things have really gotten a lot better, and so everything actually since then, we usually got at least a few radio carbon dates from, and we weren't too very elaborate on these sort of habitation sites. So there's been a lot of exhalation of entire fuses, agricultural fuel, and this, yeah, it's normal. Yeah, but I think you've definitely put your finger on elimitation, not just the data as a whole, but my research, and it's very dependent on these relative chronologies, so I sort of... Can you try to catch that? Yeah, so I limited myself to looking at similar tuned types, or these slender tunes, I think they can be more confident with the same kind of very different sites, but yeah, that is a real imitation. Thank you, we'll just... That's what I was just saying. I'm actually going to ask Rosemary as much as you. I'm wondering whether I'm assuming you're familiar with and I'm making work with Rick Wilkes' work and his idea of a structure of common difference, and the whole notion that instead of talking about styles or whatever, that there is basically an underlying code within which there are structured, recognizable, understood differences that are being laid out and whether a concept like that might be applicable. Yeah, I think that would be for me. I actually developed my framework from the practice theory, so I'm using the standard language of practice theory partly because it works, but something like what Rick has been talking about, I mean any of these are basically saying that the things that we see as mortuary deposits are the result of a variety of actions which people do under a set of assumptions about what correct action is, and you have to multiply the players and the actions and then you can account for the stability and the variability. And that's what he's saying. You just have to have a rich data set like you do. Yeah, I don't think I can add anything of similar erudition to that. I'd say I'm not as familiar as that should be. Yeah, well it's actually not, I mean he has an article in the journal Social Archaeology from 2004 or something like that, and then he had something in another journal in the mid 90's or something, but it isn't exactly it's just deceiving because he actually uses contestants in a beauty pageant in Mohawk as his example. So it's not like something you look at and say oh this is going to be directly relevant to my work, right? But he lays out this sort of notion of what he prefers to think of as a better way to talk about stylistic variation. Because he's an ethnographer who begins like as an archaeologist. Right? Yeah, so he can think both modes. Right. But it is, it's a really good and he's done that also with his work on the lesion food waste. And of course when we go all the way back, he's one of our first people to talk seriously about how we can talk about things like this as potentially indicators of wealth versus other kinds of things. So he's a good person to recruit or to engage with in the cultural society. So if you do not have anybody else that's thank you for sharing this with me people who are being polite and not wanting to rouse you with questions who might have more of a conversation, so go right ahead. So