Trade and interaction in ancient Northeast Asia: reassessing archaeological and documentary sources

At the beginning of the Common Era in East Asia, it is the culture of the Chinese mainland that maintained the position of an advanced civilization. And it is there that the first written reports on the cultures living in the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago took shape, reflecting both the growing interest on the Chinese side in things going on east of their borders and the fact that trade and interaction among the various “barbarian” cultures, including the northern steppe cultures, and with Chinese civilization, had brought about major changes with regard to social developments, hierarchies, political self-awareness, and initial state formation in Korea and Japan. Increased archaeological data from excavations in Korea and Japan indicate that trade, contacts and conflicts changed drastically during the early centuries. Archaeological research in the area of course closely connected to the study of ancient history, illuminate and embellish the fragile fabric of textual evidence from China, and from much later periods. Thus, the current issue of Crossroads not only focusses on trade and interaction in ancient nort­h­east Asia – the Chinese mainland, the northern steppe region, the Korean peninsula, and the Japanese islands, but also utilizes two major bodies of evidence, the archaeological data available from countless excavations, and historical information as given in the early texts, thus reassessing relevant archaeological and documentary sources on trade routes and exchange in the early centuries CE. The present CR volume combines the enhanced versions of three papers (Gilaizeau, Seyock, Tamura/Oga) presented at the Sixth Worldwide Conference of the Society for East Asian Archaeology (SEAA) in the panel “Trade and Interaction in Northeast Asia” (organized by Dennis Lee, Nakamura Daisuke and Barbara Seyock), which took place in Ulaan Bataar (Mongolia) in June 2014, and two additional essays (Nelson, Byington/Barnes) which also centre on the patterns of interaction in the early centuries in East-Asia and the information available from documentary sources