The Bronze Age: daggers, rice and dolmens

Korea has 30,000 to 40,000 dolmens, depending on who counts, one of the densest groups of these stone tombs anywhere in the world.

Bronze is a mix of copper and tin. It is harder to make than a stone tool: someone has to find the ore, smelt it, and cast it in a mould. In Korea the first bronze objects were few and precious, and they belonged to a small group of powerful people. When did this age begin? Textbooks say around 2000 to 1500 BCE. The National Institute of Korean History, in its New History of Korea, sums up the archaeology differently: on the peninsula, the changes that deserve the name Bronze Age started about 1000 BCE. The gap comes from how scholars define the age, by bronze objects alone, by pottery, or by changes in society as a whole.

The mandolin-shaped dagger

The best-known Bronze Age object in Korea is the bipa-hyeong donggeom, a bronze dagger whose blade swells and narrows like the body of a bipa, a lute. It is also called the Liaoning-type dagger, after the region in northeast China where many have been found. These daggers turn up across Liaoning and the whole peninsula, including at the Songguk-ri site in Buyeo. Later a slimmer, straighter dagger, the slender bronze dagger, became typical of Korea. Historians use the spread of mandolin daggers as one way to trace the reach of Gojoseon, the first Korean state.

Rice, plain pottery and a new kind of village

Most daily tools were still made of stone, but farming changed. Rice was now grown alongside barley, millets, sorghum and beans; rice grains have been found at Heunam-ri in Yeoju, Songguk-ri in Buyeo and Daepyeong-ri in Jinju. To harvest, people used the half-moon stone knife, bandal dolkal, a flat blade with holes for a cord, which let them pick ears of grain one by one as they ripened. Pottery changed too. Bronze Age pots, mumun togi or plain pottery, usually have no pattern and a flat base, so they could stand on a floor.

With more food came surplus, and with surplus came differences between people. Leaders called chiefs, gunjang, rose above the rest, and the strongest of them brought neighbouring communities under their rule. Their power shows most clearly in the way they were buried.

Dolmens

A dolmen, goindol, is a tomb made of a huge flat capstone set on supporting stones. Moving a capstone of that size took the labour of a great many people, so a dolmen is evidence of a leader who could command them. The Ministry of Culture puts the number of dolmens in Korea at close to 30,000; the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture estimates about 40,000. In December 2000 the dolmen sites of Gochang, Hwasun and Ganghwa were listed together as World Heritage. Ganghwa has one of the largest table-type dolmens in Korea, at Bugeun-ri: the Korea Heritage Service gives it a height of 2.6 metres and a capstone 6.5 metres long, while the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture gives the capstone as 7.1 metres. Hwasun keeps the quarry where the stones were cut.