Recasting the Korean Iron Age in Historiography and State Formation Discourse

Critical studies of contemporary South Korean archaeology both domestic and international frequently cite nationalism as the dominant paradigm that has guided the discipline since its modern inception in the immediate post-Korean War period. In this understanding, Korean archaeology has and continues to be a core component of South Korea’s nation building project and that this explains scholars’ preoccupation with locating Korean ethnicity in the remote past, methodological frameworks like culture history and neo-evolutionism, and attempts to fit the particulars of Korean history into more general world archaeological timelines. This is most apparent in the more or less continuous debates over the Korean Iron Age (ca. 300 BCE to 300 CE), including its periodization and the nature of social development that led to the first historical kingdoms or state-level polities in the southern peninsula (Paekche, Silla, and the Kaya groups).

This paper reframes critical discussion of Korean Iron Age research by positioning it as the modern instantiation of a much longer historiographical thread that dates back to the earliest extant writings about groups on the Korean peninsula, the third century Account of the Han in the Sanguozhi. I compare modern state formation debates to the constant recapitulation of the ‘Samhan’ in the peninsula’s long historiographical tradition. Through this, I argue that this malleable period has been used as a testbed for new conceptions of peninsular identity since antiquity. I demonstrate further how a backdrop of nationalism obscures the far more diverse, subtle, and experimental ways students of this period have co-constructed how we understand ‘Korea’ today.