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I was delighted to be invited to the fifth Shanghai Archaeology Forum last December, happily revived after the COVID closedowns. This meeting is becoming a major fixture in the archaeological calendar, for every two years the advisory committee is asked to adjudicate all the nominations for field discovery and research awards. This is a tough assignment, given the number of nominations and the high quality throughout. All the winners and many other archaeologists from every corner of the globe are invited, and this makes the event unique, for one can meet up with colleagues from Iran one minute and from Tajikistan the next, or chat about the latest advances in the Amazon or India. For this event, the overriding theme was the archaeology of climate change and social sustainability. The opening ceremony was hosted by the Mayor of Shanghai and the Chinese deputy minister of culture, and, after the welcome addresses, the awardees were invited on to the stage to receive their certificates. This was followed by a lecture from each, describing their various interests and achievements, and capped in the evening by a splendid banquet.
I was delighted that my nominee for a field discovery award, Adam Brumm, was successful. Adam described how he came across the earliest narrative art known, from Sulawesi in Indonesia. This was followed, almost with gasps of amazement, by Ran Honglin describing the opening of the newly discovered sacrificial pits at Sanxingdui in China’s Sichuan Province. The excavations there have taken on a dimension a lifetime away from the archaeology I remember years ago in England, out in the sun or rain in all weathers. At Sangxingdui, it is all done within an air-conditioned building, by diggers lying on suspended platforms dressed like cosmonauts. We saw movie footage of the precious bronzes, ivories, and jades being uncovered, lifted, and immediately placed into the hands of the waiting conservators. During one of our evenings, we were taken to the Shanghai University Museum for a remarkable exhibition that juxtaposed Sanxingdui bronzes with Rodin sculptures. One is accustomed to seeing images of the massive bronzes, and some were on display, but there were also smaller examples of equal quality. No longer does the Shang Dynasty dominate this period: the Shu Dynasty that produced the Sanxingdui bronzes actually puts much of the Shang output in the shade, at least in my opinion.
Extraordinary discoveries
At a previous Forum, we were given a memorable presentation on Göbekli Tepe by Klaus Schmidt, and at this one we were introduced by Necmi Karul to Karahantepe. This is one of several new ritual sites in southern Turkey, with their huge carved stone columns, and covers at least 10ha. The excavations have yielded more of the remarkable animal and human sculptures that were clearly objects of veneration and brought in adherents from miles around, before the temples were abandoned and covered in rubble.
From Turkey, we moved far south to Kalambo Falls in Zambia, where Desmond Clark years ago was unravelling the occupation there of early hominins. Larry Barham has returned to this iconic location, and found a surviving wooden structure dating back almost half a million years. Such discoveries really require a redefinition of the ‘Stone Age’, when it is appreciated that wooden artefacts were probably just as significant then. And to make the morning complete, we listened to Johannes Müller describing the truly massive Trypillia mega-sites of the Ukraine, Romania, and Moldavia. Dating back to 4000 BC, these are settlements in which up to 2,800 houses were laid out in concentric rings round a central precinct. A geomagnetic plan of one of these sites, Maidanetske, presents the astonishing image of, in effect, a mega-city occupied by a non-literate community that endured for many generations before being abandoned in about 3600 BC, probably as social inequality began to make the management of the population unwieldy.
Another presentation was of particular personal interest. For my PhD, I spent months in Switzerland, working on the animal husbandry of the inhabitants of the famous lake villages. One of my field visits took me to Bern and the site of Burgäschisee, so I made sure to button-hole Albert Hafner, from the University of Bern, after he told us of his research on the dendrochronologies of those remarkable sites. To know that a house was built in the autumn of 3165 BC, and repaired the following spring, is a pretty accurate chronology. Not only has Albert continued this work in Switzerland, but he has also expanded it into North Macedonia at Lake Ohrid, where similar structures have survived.
Sarah Klassen is a leader in the new generation of experts on Angkor. I had communicated with her, but this was the first chance to have a get-together. I was all ears when she described the results of her LiDAR explorations of Angkor, and how it has honed our understanding not only of the layout of the ancient city, but also the organisation of the water reticulation and integration between the authority of the state and the local decisions made by the many suburban communities that made up the population of Greater Angkor.
The expansion of Anatomically Modern Humans from Africa is an issue of considerable interest to me, since the route into Southeast Asia and ultimately Australia seems to have been the one with least natural obstacles to migration. So I followed Katerina Harvati’s talk on Apidima Cave in Greece intently. There, two partial skulls have been found, encased in breccia, on the cave roof. After the long and difficult procedure of extraction and reconstruction, they were found to come from two species: one a Neanderthal and the other a modern human. The dating for both was a great surprise, for the modern human is about 200,000 years old, whereas the Neanderthal is 40 millennia later. It looks very much as if there were several forays into Europe by modern humans that did not endure, before the resident Neanderthals were overwhelmed with a much later series of migrations.
Following the winner’s presentations, we were given the choice of eight parallel sessions, all of which one would have wished to attend. In one of these, I had the opportunity to describe our work on the impact of a climatic crisis that afflicted Southeast Asia about 1,800 years ago, when the monsoon rains regularly faltered, endangering the rice-farming communities of the later Iron Age. By integrating a nexus of changes involving the creation of reservoirs and canals, irrigating bunded rice fields, and harnessing the water buffalo to a plough, the elite leaders reacted positively to the new conditions. We find them interred with a wealth of mortuary offerings, but the downside was deteriorating health due to the swampy conditions round the settlements that resulted in a dramatic rise in infant mortality.
It is impossible to describe in a few paragraphs the plethora of papers to choose from. There was the rise and fall of social complexity in Valencia, Spain, during the Copper Age, climate change in Honduras, the impact of climatic events at Teotihuacán in Mexico – the list is comprehensive and, at the end of the day, almost overwhelming. So a memorable concert that evening given by the Shanghai University Music Department that mixed traditional Chinese and Western selections was particularly welcome, followed the morning after by the field-trip. For this, we were given two options: the city tour of museums and a visit to the Neolithic site of Sanxingdun. Having been on the former, I boarded the bus for the site-visit. I was keen to see Lake Taihu and the scenery typical of the lower reaches of the mighty Yangtze River. I saw neither, for the further we drove inland, the thicker fell the snow. However, it was a memorable day out. We first visited the Jiangsu Museum, to enjoy a guided tour of finds from Sanxingdun. This is a Majiabang Culture middle Neolithic settlement where extensive excavations have unearthed occupation contexts in conjunction with about 1,000 human graves. So here was an opportunity to compare this with the Neolithic sites I have excavated in Thailand, occupied by rice-farmers with ancestral links to the Yangtze region. We then travelled further west, to visit the site itself. Here, we walked past open excavation squares now filled with snow, to the on-site laboratories where more finds were being curated.
Professor Wangwei, the Secretary-General of the Forum and one of the award-winners this year, along with his team, is to be congratulated on presiding over yet another memorable occasion. I left once again most impressed by the vibrancy of Chinese research, and indeed that of so many colleagues and institutions from every point of the compass. The Forum is now established as a major event in the archaeological calendar.
Charles Higham is a Professor at Otago University in New Zealand, and an authority on Cambodia's Angkor civilisation and Ban Non Wat in Thailand.
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