| Abstract: |
It is argued that the long-wave of the southward dispersal of a copper-base metallurgical package and/or of the actual miners/founders from the copper-rich regions of the mid-Yangtze valley and its sophisticated, metallurgical tradition of the mid-to-late second millennium BC, known as the Wucheng/Xin’gan culture, in the long run sparked the onset of the Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) Bronze Age in the late second millennium BC. Archaeological evidence from Lingnan and MSEA indicates that emerging elites, unable to sustain the complex production of sophisticated bronze artifacts, might have “acquired” metal items of a lower technological profile, for example, the socketed tools cast in bivalve stone molds (BVMs). The geographic scope of this general, but definitely jeopardized phenomenon imbued of complex cultural and technological implications, invested low-ranked societies that, interacting since the late Neolithic within similar cultural environments, were experimenting different paths of cultural complexity growth. However, arguably the spread of the bronze technology and media among low-ranked societies only marginally affected the ongoing multilinear and multidimensional processes of sociocultural evolution.
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