The Rise and Fall of China’s First States
Tides of History
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The Golden Age of the Large Fortified Sites
Tausi was the biggest and most sophisticated site in an area crammed full of other settlements, bounded by rivers on two sides and mountains on the other. A recent survey counted 54 tause period sites in this area, divided into either three or four tiers depending on which archaeologist dou believe at least three of these sites were larger than hectars in size. Over all, processes of social stratification and increasing hierarchical power that culminated in these small states were still visible. But as powerful and prosperous as these places obviously were practically none of them lasted in the centuries around two thousand b c. Those enormous earthen burial platforms of the langju culture at the mouth of the yangsee,
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