Page 69 - Lungshan Pottery Lunshanoid Research 1977 Paper

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in earlier times. Cluster II (the Liang-chu culture)

was largely ancestral to the subsequent Yueh culture

and cluster IV (the Ta-wen-k*ou culture) which geographi-

cally overlapped the area of the Shantung Lung-shan culture

falls into the area occupied by the so-called Eastern Yi

people according to historical texts (Chang 19681 1 5 9 ) .

According to Prof. E.G. Pulleyblank, (personal communica-

tion), Eastern Yi, Wu, and Yueh may have been Mon-khmer

language speaking people, and Ch'u may have been one of

the Miao-Yao speakers.

To deal with ethnic groupings in this prehistoric

context raises the discussion to a more difficult level.

First of a l l , the definition of "different ethnic groups"

is not an easy one to make. If this definition rests

w
on linguistic considerations, the discussion ill be the
same as above. If the definition is based on social

w
structure, i t ill be extremely difficult to see the
relevance between the cluster and the ethnic groups.

However, when we focus on the subsistence pattern, there

are some hints for us to assume the possibility that

some different clusters may represent different ethnic

groups. Since natural resources, such as the flora and