Chinese archaeology

Review of John Boardman, The Relief Plaques of Eastern Eurasia and China. The ‚Ordos Bronzes', Peter the Great's Treasure, and their kin. BAR S2146. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2010 and Ulf Jäger/Sascha Kahnsteiner. Ancient Metalwork from the Black Sea to China in the Borowski Collection. Ruhpolding/Mainz: Franz Phillip Rutzen, 2011.

Review:
"Liu Yang’s catalogue for the terracotta warriors…is an outstanding contribution to the literature on the tomb of Qin Shi Huangdi as well as a beautifully illustrated record of the seminal objects from the Terracotta Warriors Museum. Readers will not be disappointed: China’s Terracotta Warriors is much more than yet another book about China’s most glorious excavation site"―Nancy Steinhardt, Orientations

"The extensively illustrated catalogue, one of the most detailed overviews of the Qin and the First Emperor yet published, is vital for anyone even remotely interested in this pivotal period in Chinese art, culture and history."―Martin Barnes Lorber, Asian Art

"The Minneapolis catalogue stands out as one of the most informative and groundbreaking in the mass of books on the terracotta warriors. Within the plethora of books about the First Emperor of China and the terracotta soldiers placed at his tomb, this volume is exceptional in its placing of the First Emperor in his context—a young ruler of a vassal state of questionable 'barbarian' influences forging an empire out of the ruins of an old world, a world he conquered with a invincible army and governed with an iron fist." —Chao-Hui Jenny Liu, China Review International

"This dazzling catalogue by Curator Liu Yang traces the development of the Qin state from the 9th century BCE to the reign of the First Emperor, through an array of sculpted works and architectural remains from Shaanxi province....Written by an internationally renowned cast of scholars, the volume features detailed chapters of manageable length, making it accessible to the undergraduates but also relevant to advanced researchers.....Overall, this is a much-needed update on a well-trodden subjects." —A.R.Miller, Choice

The past ten years have been particularly exciting for scholars studying early China. The field has witnessed the publication of a number of scholarly monographs dealing with recent discoveries, and Xiaolong Wu’s recent monograph on the Zhongshan sites during theWarring States Period (475–221 BCE) is a significant and refreshing addition to that growing bibliography and to our knowledge of early Chinese material culture...

Il volume, ampiamente illustrato, è un viaggio affascinante per "Le antiche Vie della Cina", alla scoperta dei lunghi percorsi che hanno cambiato le sorti del mondo.
Dalla più conosciuta Via della Seta, alle Vie della Giada, del Bronzo, della Lacca, della Porcellana, per concludere con la Via del Tè: un’indagine archeologico-artistica, estesa nello spazio e nel tempo, sull'interazione di popoli e culture differenti, il cui incontro/scontro ha rivoluzionato il divenire storico e reso il dialogo interculturale la vera “merce” di scambio.
“Il commercio – come si scopre leggendo il libro - è solamente un aspetto della storia perché i movimenti delle religioni, il contatto tra i popoli e la trasmissione di idee e tecnologie sono divenute la chiave di volta per la comprensione del progresso delle culture e delle civiltà coinvolte in questa arena.”

Bilder sind weitaus vielschichtiger, als der Begriff „Bild“ es zu vermitteln vermag. Ausgehend von dieser Feststellung beschaftigt sich die vorliegende Arbeit mit dem Aussagepotential, das Bilder aus schriftlosen Kulturen heute noch haben. Postuliert wird, dass Bilder eine wertvolle Quelle fur den Archaologen sein konnen - dies jedoch unter der Voraussetzung, dass nicht ihre ursprungliche Bedeutung zu ergrunden versucht, sondern stattdessen die Strukturen ihrer Nutzung, die „Bildpraxis“, untersucht wird. Dies ist uber eine Einordnung in den archaologischen Kontext moglich. Die Vorgehensweise wird anhand von figurlich verzierten Gurtelplatten erprobt, welche vor allem vom 5. Jahrhundert v. Chr. bis zur Zeitenwende im nordchinesischen Steppenraum auftreten. Deutlich wurde dabei, dass die Bildobjekte eindeutig intentionell und bestimmten Konventionen folgend genutzt wurden. Klar zu unterscheidende Motivgruppen traten regional begrenzt auf und waren sowohl alters- als auch geschlechtssp...

"In my study "Prestigegüter entlang der Seidenstraße? Archäologische und historische Untersuchungen zu Chinas Beziehungen zu Kulturen des Tarimbeckens vom zweiten bis frühen fünften Jahrhundert nach Christus (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010)," I developed a method to identify genuine prestige goods in the context of burials. Whenever members of social groups were unable to obtain desired artifacts – be it on account of insufficient financial means or because they were prohibited to acquire them –, they resorted to a rather simple solution: imitations.
As early as the 8th century BCE, people in China began to emulate ritual bronzes. These were the ultimate status symbols at the time and possession of such valuable bronze objects clearly was restricted to the social élite. Various types of bronze vessels and bells constituted a so-called ritual set; the more different objects and the more specimens of each single type of object an individual could call his (sometimes her) own, the higher his / her social rank. At least this much we learn from several prescriptive texts dating from the 2nd through 1st centuries BCE. The ritual bronzes were an integral part of ritual ceremonies held at the ancestral shrines of one’s lineage. They were, however, not only employed to demonstrate one’s social achievements to the ancestors, but ultimately found their way into tombs and hoards where ritual sets are a common sight.
This paper is going to show how sumptuary rules grew less rigid with the factual decline of the Zhou. Earlier, expressing ones social rank through ritual bronzes was the prerogative of dignitaries with close ties to the royal house. Now, even politically rather insignificant local potentates made use of (substandard) replicas in attempts to signal their social position. The prestige of authentic ritual bronzes finally fostered the diffusion of an initially extremely elitist phenomenon. How strongly the association of ritual bronzes with social rank penetrated ancient Chinese thought and practices – that is to say, Chinese culture – is obvious in the fact that imitations of ritual bronzes remained a staple in tomb assemblages at least until the 2nd century CE."

CCR Translation Contest for Young Scholars


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About Chinese Cultural Relics
Chinese Cultural Relics, a quarterly journal published in print and online by East View Press, is the official English translation of the prestigious Chinese archaeology journal Wenwu (Cultural Relics). For more information about the journal, please visit www.eastviewpress.com/Journals/CulturalRelics.aspx

About East View Press
East View Press is the journal and book publishing division of East View Information Services (www.eastview.com) and its related company, East View Geospatial (geospatial.com). Its publications are geared towards serving researchers and others interested in major international and public policy issues related to the geographic area of the former Soviet Union and China. Regardless of format, East View Press has the mission of adding special value (usually by translation into English) to authoritative source materials in order to make them available to the widest possible audience globally.

Recent archeobotanical work has shed light on prehistoric food globalization across the Eurasian landmass; however, much less research has focused on the foodways of the historical cities and settlements found throughout Central Asia on various portions of the ‘Silk Road’. Here, we present archeobotanical and isotopic results from recent excavations at Shichengzi, a Han dynasty (202 BC–AD 220) military garrison. Our archeobotanical results recovered from 11 samples reveal that four types of cereals, naked barley, wheat, common millet, and foxtail millet, were the most common crops at the site. Naked barley, a drought and cold resistant crop, comprised 79% of the crop assemblage recovered from Shichengzi, and the rest of the assemblage is composed of wheat and millet. The reliance on drought resistant crops indicates that people at Shichengzi oriented their agricultural strategy toward mitigating environmental risks. In addition, our isotopic analyses (δ13C and δ15N) of charred cereal grains (n = 22), animal and human remains (n = 12) recovered from excavations at Shichengzi suggests that the δ15N values of cereals were enriched by human or livestock dung. Moreover, the δ13C data from Shichengzi suggest that farmers preferentially planted their crops in wide areas that would have received the highest amounts of water available on the northern piedmont of the Tianshan mountains. Our research contributes to the growing understanding of the diversity of agricultural strategies used along the Silk Road.

The Chinese palace was the residence of the imperial family, the seat of political power where state affairs were decided and certain state rituals and ceremonies were held, and an embodiment of both the ideal social order and the aesthetic principles of the time. Located near the center of the capital city, the Chinese palace was typically encircled by a palace wall and arranged along a north–south axis into multiple courtyards, a model which burgeoned in the first millennium BCE and continued into the early 1900s, observable still in the Forbidden City in Beijing. Palaces were predominantly timber-frame structures, but their architecture underwent considerable transformation through history due to breakthroughs in technology and exchanges with non-Chinese cultures.

A detailed discussion and comparison of the two dynasties - Shang and Zhou - with reference to archaeological findings.

Please note:
If you are a student at any University, and you wish to cite my essay, do so prudently. It has not been published in any journal or paper, and will not be considered a properly peer-reviewed source by your teachers. Instead, I would advise you to bounce off my ideas; use them to deepen your own inquiries into the topic.

Alongside the thousands of terracotta warriors discovered in the tomb complex of the first emperor of China, were tens of thousands of bronze weapons, including arrowheads and crossbow triggers, lances, spears, halberds (and the ferrules associated with them), swords and a few other special types. This quantity and quality of bronze weaponry provides an extremely rare opportunity to investigate patterns of standardisation and labour organisation within a single, very large and intentional assemblage as well as to consider the role of bronze production during the Qin period (325-206 BC) which marks perhaps the most crucial early stage in Chinese political unification.

This book draws upon extensive measurements, typological analysis and related statistical treatment, as well as a study of the spatial distribution of those bronze weapons found in the most extensively excavated part of the tomb complex (the five easternmost trenches in Pit 1). Metric data and statistical assessment of inter- and intra-group variation (e.g. coefficients of variation) suggest interesting patterns with regard to relative degrees of standardisation. A combination of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and point pattern analysis are used to assess formally any spatial patterning in the weapons and their analytical attributes, which then also provides further information about the labour organisation behind the production, transportation and placement of weapons as they were moved from the workshop and/or arsenal to the funeral pits. Combining these insights with those obtained from inscriptions found on some of the weapons and from ancient documents, this project investigates what technologies and crafting behaviour affected weapons production and labour organisation in a centralised imperial system.

This research project fills a gap in the study of mass production, the behaviour of craftspeople, and related logistical organisation in ancient China and, first time, to provide empirical data by analysing systematically on the types, dimensions and spatial patterns of Qin bronze weapons for the Terracotta Army in the Emperor Qin Shihuang’s tomb complex.

The paper intends to show that archaeological data may offer a glimpse beyond the historical facts known about Wang Xizhi and his kin. The discussion centers on the question of the location of Wang Xizhi's tomb. Comparing written sources with archaeological material, i.e. Jin Dynasty tombs excavated in what used to be Kuaiji and in the capital area of Jiankang (present-day northeastern Zhejiang and Nanjing respectively), It will argue that there is ample reason to believe that Wang Xizhi himself was, in contrast to what was passed down in tradition, not buried in the mountains of Kuaiji, but near the Eastern Jin capital Jiankang, maybe even next to his kin.

The monograph by Stanislaw Kuczera “Antique and Ancient History of China. Early Neolithic of the South ” is the second volume of a comprehensive study of the Stone Age in China (the first volume, “Antique and Ancient History of China. Old Stone Age” was published in 1996). By degree of details and volume of processed data it has no analogues not only in Russian, but also in Western literature as a whole. Like the first volume, this one can be regarded as a kind of summary encyclopedia of the early Neolithic of southern China - the author analyzed and processed thousands of reports and other publications of Chinese archaeologists of recent decades (until 2018). This is especially valuable for a reader who does not read Chinese, but will render invaluable services to Sinologists, including Chinese, since it is extremely difficult even for a specialist to navigate the ever-growing volume of Chinese publications on archaeological topics.