High tin or high lead: distinctive alloying practices of the pastoral Yuhuangmiao culture in Northeast China during the first millennium BCE

Abstract

The Jundushan cemetery, located on the northern boundary of the present-day Beijing, sits at a crucial nexus between the Yan and Taihang mountains linking northern and central China. This strategic location provides an interesting case for examining interactions between pastoralism and agriculture around the early half of the first millennium BCE. Under this light, this paper aims to illustrate the local metallurgical development, exemplified by the key metal assemblage discovered at the Jundushan cemetery of the Yuhuangmiao culture. It contains wider social implications on the unique aspect of the Jundushan people and their broader communication network. The new alloying and lead isotopic analyses of 39 bronzes reveal a series of changes in both metallurgical practice and metal supply network. Jundunshan is characterized by the use of both high-tin and high-lead bronzes, with tin playing a particularly essential role. They are probably the result of two different alloying processes, one with almost pure copper being alloyed by pure tin, the other with pure copper combining with a specific tin-lead mixture (Sn: Pb ≈ 45:55). Lead isotopic data reveal a clear change during the transition between the mid and late stage of Jundushan. The major type of lead used in the last stage at Jundushan (ca. 6th–5th century BCE) appears not widely circulated in the states of central China, indicative of a local lead source accessed by Jundunshan. The new data bridge an important gap in our knowledge of the metallurgical practice and flow of metal around the early first millennium BCE in northeastern China, a region where agriculturalists and pastoralists were interacted.