This study reconstructs the gender roles and changing social status of women in the Dian archaeological culture, a late Metal Age society first discovered at Shizhaishan in Yunnan Province, P.R.C. This culture produced images in a lively, narrative style that is unique in its naturalism. Of particular importance to this study are Dian compositions of detailed people, animals and architecture which adorn bronze vessels filled with cowry shells. These scenes depict activities presumably important to the Dian people, including combat, ritual performances, and the weaving of cloth. In several examples, women are portrayed in ways that suggest they enjoyed high status in Dian society, perhaps equal to that of elite men. Grave inventories support this conclusion, at least for some women, if only for a short time. It is shown here that the idiosyncratic Dian style was itself a marker of high status, used by the elite to confirm their superior social position. Dian noble women employed this style in their burial goods, and were interred with the same markers of wealth and authority as were Dian men. This gender panty is not observable in lower level burials, where female interments are consistently the poorest within any circumscribed group.; I argue that the economic and authoritative disparities between the two classes of Dian women, both absolute and with respect to men of the same social standing, can in part be explained by their differing roles in the creation of a prestige cloth, highly valued by the Dian elite. It is also suggested that the devaluation of that product around 109 BC contributed to the degradation of women's social status. Regional elite burial programs were transformed in the last centuries BCE, as Chinese objects and practices gradually replaced those of local character. Mortuary remains demonstrate a coetaneous decline in the social position of woman. By the end of this period, women were no longer buried with the complement of high status markers. In fact women were not represented in later aristocratic interments at all.; As textual data relating to this region are few in number and post-date the period in question, this study relies on the material remains of the Dian, recovered from numerous sites in Yunnan Province in the past four decades. The aims of this study are (1) To analyze the material remains and burial patterns of the Dian cemeteries in order to explain these representations of women in their art; (2) To detect those aspects of Dian material culture which reflect high status, (3) To determine what practices and/or objects, (or combinations thereof) indicate the sex of the deceased; and (4) To determine the basis for the decline in the status of women, as reflected in changes in their treatment in burial.
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