Origin of the Alans

[Alanus]

"Prostrate burials" in the Northern Zone and at Anyang (the Shang capital).
Updated 4/24/17 to Remove Contextural Errors.

In previous posts, we have discussed face-down burials at Tevsh Uul in the Gobi Altai. At the time, there seemed to be a relation between the Tevsh site and the intrusion of a steppe culture into China's Northern Zone, especially within the Lijiaya Culture along the southern flow of the Yellow River just west of the Taihang Mountains. To date, I have been unable to find info on Lijiaya burial practices.

The vast majority of PDFs and books on Shang and Zhou China discuss burial contents, especially large bronze containers, and even speculate about gender "definition" and social status according to the number of valued articles within each tomb. However, 99.9 % of all academic descriptions fail to mention the actual burial position of the interred person. I find this omission rather odd. Wouldn't someone (like me) wish to know whether the deceased was placed in a flexed, supine, or face-down position... BECAUSE-- just possibly-- this fact might indicate a cultural abnormality?


   
Fortunately, Yan Sun, a professor at Gettysburg College, came to my rescue. She did not mention burial positions of the Lijiaya Culture, but provided us with some great tidbits about the Baifu area. You will recall Baifu M2 and M3, the graves of two "northern culture" individuals discussed in previous posts. At least one of these military personages, the male in B-M3, was interred face-down. Baifu was located (almost centrally) in the Zhangjiayuan Culture... "the deceased, rich or poor, were buried in a prone position. Also, the deceased was exclusively oriented to the east [a steppe feature]. Similar to the burials at Baifu, most of the Zhangjiayuan burials featured a bronze ding and gui assemblage as well. The shape and décor of these vessels is typical Shang and early Zhou style. Furthermore, short inscriptions and clan emblems... suggest their cultural connection with the Zhou." The above map pinpoints Baifu and other military or trading posts with a black pyramid, while major Zhangjiayuan sites are shown with a black square.

The Zhangjiayuan Culture (1,300 to 700 B.C.) appears to be an "indigenous" steppe polity, then becoming a core of the Yan state during the Zhou era. Yan Sun notes that elite Zhangjiayuan graves contain gold fan-shaped bracelets and trumpet earrings, also found within Lijiaya Culture burials, both items not worn by the Shang but pleasing to "northern" tastes. Interestingly, the earliest Zhangjiayuan burials show up around 1,300 B.C., just before the chariot's introduction into the Shang military.

Let us move to "downtown" Anyang, capital of the late Shang dynasty. Over 950 burials have been excavated in this area, most of them at Yinxu. The eastern area contained royal interments, large and with accessing ramps. The smaller graves-- those of the elite, commoners, and slaves-- are located in the western zone. Once again, we find vital information from Yan Sun-- the actual percentage of prostrate burials within the entire Shang polity:

"In 284 or 28.8% of the 986 burials at Anyang, the deceased was placed in a prone position. The deceased include nobles and commoners, males and females. More tombs in the western section of Anyang included burials of the deceased in this position than those of other areas of the site, and more males than females were buried in the prone position." (I thank Professor Sun for sending me this update. Material Culture and Social Identity in the Western Zhou Frontier, Asian Archaeology, Vol. 1, Beijing, 2013)

For comparison, here are the statistics of the burials of the Peng Clan, Hengbei, Shanxi Province, also courtesy of Yan Sun:
Peng Clan Prone Burial with bronzes (noble, elite): 28.6 %
Peng Clan Prone Burial with pottery (commoners): 33.6 %
Peng Clan Prone Burial with no artifacts (slaves): 33.3 %


   
Above illustration: Yinxu "commoner" burial in prostrate position, orientation toward the north. (Scytho-Siberian burials at Pazyryk, Ukok, and Berel K 11, are east-oriented.) This is one Big Eye-Opener, a "proto-Scythian" buried is his own cultural style yet oriented as if he were Chinese. We are looking at the symbiosis of two cultures within a single grave.

I find it strange that hundreds of PDFs and books have been written about Anyang and the late Shang culture, yet only Professor Sun has had the insight to mention a very important fact-- the significant number of prone or "prostrate" burials within a purportedly "Chinese" culture which normally buried its dead in a supine position. The same applies to the early Western Zhou clan cemetery of Peng Bo, which at first thought seems to continue the late Shang practice. However, we should refer back to Tevsh Uul, Gobi Altai, where males were buried face-down while the known woman was interred in a supine position.

This burial style denotes a steppe migration into the core Shang polity. Archaeologists can diminutize, even dismiss, the "northern" influence on the Shang and Zhou cultures. But we cannot conveniently "tuck away" so obvious a steppe burial-rite within the capital city of the Shang Dynasty. Face-down burials are beyond "a steppe influence," beyond the oft-dismissed notion of "diffusion," and archaeologically prove that the introducers of the chariot were not "outsiders." This is not a case of "trade" but a first-hand intrusion. A significant number of probable Indo-Iranians lived, worked, and fought for the Shang within the hierarchy of a dynastic polity.