| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 人類學研究所 === 107 === During the Late Shang period (ca. 1300-1046 BC) in the Shandong region of China, many differences appear amongst various Shang Dynasty polities. The timing of when Shandong was incorporated into the territory controlled by the Shang Dynasty was relatively late compared to the Central Plains region, but in contrast to what the true sense of what a “frontier” is taken to be, there was a strong capability to control the region, which is particularly manifested in the coexistence of agglomeration and dispersion in the distribution of sites. Furthermore, the assemblages of artifacts unearthed from a few important Shang Culture sites in the Shandong region are not completely the same as those from the core region of the Shang Dynasty near Anyang in the Central Plains. This circumstance gives rise to many questions, among which the most important is, in the end, how greatly did the situation of the distribution of Shang Culture sites in this region, after having gone through a certain historical process and then formed during the Late Shang period, impact the upper strata of the Central Plains Shang Dynasty’s governance on the Shandong region? What is the relationship and distribution patterns between these sites? This is the core issue on which this thesis focuses. Previous generations of scholars, who studied the rich data from the unearthed oracle bone records and the received historical texts, had their own understanding of the vast region in the east during the Late Shang Dynasty, looking at the interaction between Shang and Yi and the patterns of the boundaries between ethnic groups, as well as the routes of military campaigns by the Shang kings against other tribes—these are too numberous to enumerate. Archaeologists, as well, have indeed been able to discover some differences in the Shandong region in the distribition of Central Plains Shang Culture sites and indigenous Yueshi Culture sites. These past studies undoubtedly offer us important material to advance our investigations of the Shang Dynasty''s control of the Shandong region during the Late Shang period and of organization.
K-means Clusters analysis is a statistical method broadly applied across many fields. It can be used to divide irregularly distributed data points into a predetermined number of Clusters based upon their distances between each other. By viewing the changing distributions of the sites under the different number of Clusters, we can see the distribution and organization of sites under different regional scales. After calculating K-means Clusters and doing GIS map visualization, we can see many characteristics and the organization of the distribution of Shang Culture sites in the Late Shang period in the Shandong region. First, there are a large number of sites related to salt production in the Bohai Bay are of northern Shandong, highlighting the needs of the Shang Dynasty kings during the Late Shang period for salt from the Shandong region. At the same time, a large number of sites in the eastern part of northern Shandong are densely distributed, including the large-scale Subutun site in Qingzhou, which seems to be in control of salt production and trans-shipment, as well as it must having been related to military matters in the watch over the “non-Shang” groups of the Zhenzhumen Culture in the eastern Shandong Peninsula region. The group of sites along the east-west riverways in the western and central parts of northern Shandong had a certain degree of responsibility for protecting the waterways used for transporting salt toward the west. The Subutun site has been considered to belong to the noble Zi lineage of the Shang Dynasty kings, a view which also coincides with the literary record and what earlier research has called “lineage politics”. In less important areas such as the region south of the Taiyi Mountains, as well as in the areas occupied by the Yueshi Culture and other non-Shang groups, there is only a sparse distribution of sites, and there is no stability in clustering as the number of Clusters changes, showing that the connectedness between different sites is relatively weak: it seems that these sites belong to a relatively looser mode of social organization. Therefore, it can be seen that during the Late Shang period, the Shang Dynasty’s management of the Shandong region was through combined strategies stressing the control and management of major resources and transportation routes rather than comprehensive and strong control over the entire region.
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