| Abstract: |
Early societies that began to use metals, and especially alloyed metals, have been assumed to exhibit societal complexity. They are thought to appear in places where we can see increased social stratification accompanied by a coalescence of geographically extensive shared artifact inventories including ones of metal. In the case of the beginnings of metallurgy in China, for instance, its study has been particularistic and evolutionary, tied to traditional Chinese historiography and modern Marxist model of social development. This reasoning has lead to, not unsurprisingly, a contest over primacy of one culture over another. Was it an indigenous affair, or was the technology introduced from outside of the Chinese sphere? Below, I argue that it is time to reconsider both the interconnectivity of groups and the transmission of metallurgical knowledge in order to shift emphasis away from cultural interaction to sharing regionally within social fields.
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