Burial constructions of Eastern Han & Three Kingdoms and the problem of transition from late antiquity to early middle ages according to Chinese archaeology

Many general works on Chinese history published in our country have traditionally determined the Three Kingdoms as the transitional period from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages. We think that such an approach is inherited from the Soviet period of the development of sinology, when the end of the Han dynasty has been considered to be the landmark of the «interformational transition» from slavery to feudal relations. An attempt is made in this article to determine the boundary between Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages in China according the archaeological material of burial constructions of rich tombs of the «transitional» period - Later (Eastern) Han and Three Kingdoms. We centered our attention on burials of princes, belonging to zhuhou or liehou. Their graves are constructed as underground vaults made of stones or bricks with the sloping entrance dug in the earth. The vault is usually divided into two parts: front and rear chambers (sometimes there are two rear chambers made like enfilade). In most cases burial chambers are surrounded by a corridor. The graves of Later Han differ from earlier burials by the gradual extinction of wooden burial chambers, widely spread in China for many centuries, and the emergence of stone or brick chambers with barrel-vault and / or dome-vault ceilings. Graves of this type have become widely spread all over China and later on more complicated constructions have appeared. Burials of Three Kingdoms period look like Later Han ones but are smaller because of the increasing poverty of the population. Concerning the problem of archaeological determination of the boundary between Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages, our analysis of burial constructions of Eastern Han and Three Kingdoms didn’t show any great differences between them. There were only minor changes caused mostly by the increasing poverty of the population in the Three Kingdoms period. The changes inside Han period, namely the transition from wooden chambers to constructions made of brick and stone are much sharper, but they are caused not by socio-economic, but by ecological reasons: the destruction of forests that resulted in timber shortages first of all in the central, the most densely populated part of China.