Jack Davey

THE LAST TEN YEARS HAVE BEEN PRODUCTIVE FOR KOREAN archaeology and early Korean historical studies. A mature practice of field archaeology in Korea is producing more excellent data every year. There has been a flurry of new scholarship both within and outside Korea, with many studies rethinking and re-evaluating commonly held assumptions and beliefs regarding the interpretation of material culture, and significantly,muchmoreof thesedata and associated research are available inEnglish than ever before. Of particular note here are the Early Korea volumes produced by the Early Korea Project at Harvard University and the 2015 (vol. 54, no. 1) special issue of Asian Perspectives. These sources have provided excellent introductions and surveys of major periods and issues within early Korean archaeology and history. The current special issue is the result of a conference on “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Early Korea” held at University of California, Berkeley on 27 April 2017. The conference brought together scholars working on material from the Korean peninsula who blend history and archaeology in interesting ways or eschew traditional approaches entirely. The goal of this conference and this special issue is not to offer another “state of the field” overview, but to highlight the diverse and innovative approaches of early career scholars working outside of Korean academia. As a result, this issue is not strictly archaeological, historical, or focused on any one time period. The articles draw on literary studies, archaeometric techniques, and critiques of mainstream historiography in addition to more traditional historical and archaeological methodologies. It might be better thought of as a showcase of scholarship ranging chronologically from theMumun, Iron Age, and Proto-Three Kingdoms to the Three Kingdoms periods of Korea, all under the interdisciplinary heading of “Early Korea.” Although the contributors cover a variety of different topics and time periods, several coherent themes emerge from their collective work, discussed below.We hope that by providing a frame through which to think through these broader issues, scholars working elsewhere in East Asia will find value in these articles.

Prevailing models of social development for the southern Korean Iron Age (ca. 300 B.C.–A.D. 300) focus on contact with China as well as the dynamic interaction between local polities to explain the development of socio-political complexity but the nature of this contact has not been critically examined or its more granular processes explored. This article uses two prominent grave good types discovered in southeastern Korean burials to question these models as well as conceptions of archaeological cultures in the region more generally. These objects, Chinese bronze mirrors and iron objects decorated with bracken-like spiral designs, both indicate significant interaction with Han China via its administrative commanderies, but their production and diverse mortuary contexts do not conform to any current model of culture contact, acculturation, hybridity, or entanglement. The variable production processes, expression of exotic motifs through these objects, and the way these objects were interred in graves suggests that we should look for cultural unity and early indicators of socio-cultural complexity within regions where local groups were particularly active in expressing their differences within a set of agreed-upon parameters. I argue that the southern peninsula is best described as a set of interdependent local groups with a similar ritual vocabulary, but little to no political unity even directly prior to the appearance of the Three Kingdoms polities of Paekche, Silla, and Kaya. KEYWORDS: Korean Iron Age, Samhan, Three Kingdoms, Han bronze mirrors, iron production, culture contact.

This paper surfaces the major contradictions between the " Account of the Han " in the third-century Sanguozhi 三國志 (Records of the Three Kingdoms) and the twelfth-century records of early Silla in the Samguk sagi 三國史記 (History of the Three Kingdoms) with regards to the formation of the Silla kingdom in southeastern Korea during the third and fourth centuries. Archaeological material, specifically grave goods and cemeteries, is then employed to assess the conflicting historical accounts. Analysis of burial customs and tomb styles does suggest that there was a high degree of cultural cohesion evident in the region, which broadly agrees with both the above textual accounts. Nevertheless, the inconsistent adoption of grave construction techniques, differing levels of commitment to a uniform ritual practice between sites, and variable grave good displays attest to a high degree of diversity and the lack of an overarching governmental authority in southeastern Korea. The picture that emerges from the ritual evidence is one of many independent groups with a fundamentally similar cultural grammar. While the archaeology does concur with historians that favor the " Account of the Han " and the Sanguozhi, there are still problems with both texts' assertions of regional political structures and centralization. And while the two texts may be fundamentally incompatible, there is still potential value in the Samguk sagi's accounts of Silla's incipient warfare with neighboring groups.