This course is a seminar for advanced undergraduate, MA, and PhD students. We will focus on a variety of issues concerning the archaeology of Bronze Age China and explore some of the key research themes on this period and the multidisciplinary approaches used to gain understanding of them. The time period covered by the course can extend from ca. 2000-221 BC (which is roughly from the period of social complexity of the Late Neolithic period and the early use of bronze technology through the Qin unification [technically already the Iron Age]). However, our principle concern will be the earlier part of the Bronze Age, roughly between ca. 1600-1045 BC, during the historiographically-recognized Xia and Shang dynastic periods. What we will cover, however, is flexible, and we can decide as a class about which topics interest us the most this semester. This will include looking at both “classic” papers and books that are the foundation of research today and looking critically at recent publications and how they introduce new ideas and approaches, so we can see the “state of the art” in the field.

The foundation of Chinese Bronze Age archaeological research was the excavations of Yinxu 殷墟, the “Ruins of Yin” at Anyang, in the 1920s-30s, now known to be the last capital of the Shang dynasty. Our investigations will also begin here, looking at the discovery of Anyang and the understandings we have gained about such interrelated categories as: the nature of political power; the organization, structure, and roles of early cities; socio-political organization; the early Chinese writing system as seen through Shang “oracle bones”; ideology, religion, and belief systems; burial systems and their analysis; and technology, including the production of bronzes. We will also extend out from Anyang to consider earlier period archaeological sites and regional archaeological cultures as part of a “Chinese Bronze Age Interaction Sphere”, as termed by K.C. Chang. Our approach will be explicitly anthropological (we will discuss what this means) and one top concern will be the sources and nature of political power and authority.