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Cambridge Histories Online Cambridge Histories Online http://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/histories/ The Cambridge History of Ancient China From the Origins of Civilization to 221 BC Michael Loewe, Edward L. Shaughnessy Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521470308 Online ISBN: 9781139053709 Hardback ISBN: 9780521470308 Chapter 3 - Shang Archaeology pp. 124-231 Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521470308.005 Cambridge University Press CHAPTER THREE SHANG ARCHAEOLOGY Robert Bagley When Shang $! archaeology came into being seventy years ago it was the archaeology of one site, Anyang iSPJI in northern Henan province, a place firmly connected with the Shang dynasty of traditional history by the oracle- bone inscriptions unearthed there. Since 1950 its scope has widened steadily to take in new sites which, though they have not yielded inscriptions, are related to Anyang in material culture. The absence of inscriptions leaves the political status of these sites uncertain, but the practice of Chinese archaeol- ogists has been to give them a place in history by assuming connections with the Shang royal house. New finds have been attached to traditional history on a model supplied by tradition: since the Shang dynasty was represented by later writers as the paramount cultural and political power of its time, sites and finds distant from the Shang court have been assigned either to political subordinates of the Shang king or to inferiors vaguely imagined as barbarians. No independent check of this model is supplied by the Anyang oracle inscriptions, for they too have been interpreted on the assumption of the Shang court's paramount status. Shang archaeology has operated on the premise that traditional history provides an adequate account of the past and that all archaeological discoveries should find a natural place within that account. Yet as archaeological finds multiply, it becomes increasingly evident that the centrality and cultural unity which are the essence of the traditional model are nowhere to be seen in the archaeological record of the time of the Anyang kings. By that time, the last two or three centuries of the second mil- lennium B.C., civilization had long since spread to a very large area, and the evidence for civilized societies geographically remote and culturally different from Anyang is now abundant. Rationalizations that would attach the whole of a large and diverse archaeological record to a royal house attested at one city in north China have come to look arbitrary and improbable. 124 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 150.214.205.85 on Tue Sep 16 11:38:12 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521470308.005 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 SHANG ARCHAEOLOGY 125 This chapter therefore seeks to set out the archaeological evidence in a way that does not assume that the picture it paints is known in advance. The chapter begins with a brief history of the archaeology of the Shang dynasty, in other words, of archaeology conceived as an exploration of the textual record. This will serve to explain how the assumptions of traditional histo- riography have manifested themselves in archaeology. In subsequent parts of the chapter, terms that embody those assumptions will be used only in very strict senses. "Shang" and "Shang dynasty" will refer only to the family whose kings (real or mythical) are named in the Anyang oracle texts. "Anyang period" will refer to the time of the nine kings whose inscriptions have been found at Anyang, and it will be used only in reference to the Anyang site. Since no such archaeological definition can be given for the expression "Shang period," it will be avoided. The word "dynasty" calls for special caution, since in Chinese historiography its connotations extend dangerously beyond the dictionary meaning of a ruling family. The expression "Chinese civilization" is open to the similar objection that it represents a vague and anachronistic concept whose projection backward into the second millen- nium B.C. can only mislead. Apart from two or three centuries in the life of one city, the second mil- lennium belongs to prehistory. We cannot take later traditions as our guide to prehistory, for this is only to impose the beliefs and purposes of later times on the archaeological record. Awkwardly, however, our present knowledge of the archaeological record has itself been shaped by tradition. Fieldwork has been planned under the guidance of texts, and it has focused above all on the so-called Central Plain (Zhongyuan 'PW-) region of North China, in other words on the middle Yellow River valley and the Wei ?ff valley, because tradition locates the first dynasties there. Fortunately a corrective to the geographical bias of text-based archaeology is available in the form of chance finds - the same finds, in fact, that have made the expression "Shang archaeology" problematic by persistently wid- ening its application. Reliance on chance finds amounts in practice to reliance on a single category of artifact, cast bronzes, since no other is so widely known or so consistently reported in the archaeological literature, but the limitation to this one form of evidence is by no means fatal. Artifacts of cast bronze are technologically and typologically the most distinctive trait of material culture in second-millennium China. Moreover to a far greater degree than in other ancient civilizations, the metal industry in China is a revealing index of cultural development. The second part of the chapter therefore turns to the bronze industry for a purely archaeological definition of the chapter s scope and approach. Large-scale metallurgy supplies a work- able criterion for identifying the earliest civilized societies in China, and by Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 150.214.205.85 on Tue Sep 16 11:38:15 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521470308.005 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 IZ6 ROBERT BAGLEY tracing its development we obtain a sensitive measure of relative chronology and cultural affiliations. The development of the bronze industry sketched in the second part pro- vides the scaffolding for the main part of the chapter, a survey of sites and finds whose relationships can be tentatively diagnosed on the evidence of bronzes. The principal features of Early Bronze Age material culture are intro- duced in the course of this survey. The survey has the further purpose, however, of reviewing the known archaeological record in a way that lends itself to inferences of a historical kind, against which the images of tradi- tional history can be tested. THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE SHANG DYNASTY From the moment of its birth in the early decades of this century, Chinese archaeology was involved in controversies over the value and credibility of received accounts of Chinese antiquity. The crisis of traditional culture at the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 called into question cherished beliefs about the past, and there was little agreement as to what could or should be sal- vaged. For many intellectuals the ratification or revision of ancient history was an important part of the effort to fashion a Chinese identity that could survive confrontation with the forces of modernization. Some sought to pre- serve tradition unchanged, others to adapt it to serve present ends, still others to write an ancient history that met modern standards of proof. At such a time the oracle bones, which collectors had begun acquiring from antique dealers at the turn of the century, could not fail to command wide attention, for it had been recognized from the first that they were inscribed with names recorded in traditional history as kings of the Shang dynasty. Scholars who might well agree on nothing else agreed on the importance of the oracle inscriptions. To Luo Zhenyu H$i3£ (1866-1940) and Wang Guowei 3E19&£ (1877-1927), who combined a deep interest in the inscriptions with an anxiety to defend received history and the values it sanctioned, they were a precious vindication of tradition. To the historian Gu Jiegang 11*1111!] (1893—1980), whose work in the early 1920s showed that accounts of the Xia jE dynasty and of earlier sage-kings had the character of folklore, they were evidence that Shang had a different status from Xia, and they promised fresh source material for a newly rigorous study of history.1 1 For Luo Zhenyu, Wang Guowei, and early oracle inscription studies, see Joey Bonner, Wang Kuo-wei: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), chapters 12-14. F°r Gu Jiegang, see Arthur W. Hummel, The Autobiography of a Chinese Historian (Leiden: Brill, 1931); and Laurence A. Schneider, Ku Chieh-kang and China's New History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). At least one prominent scholar, Zhang Binglin SffiK, denounced the oracle bones as forgeries; it was the Anyang excavations that supplied the final demonstration of their authenticity. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Downloaded from Cambridge Histories Online by IP 150.214.205.85 on Tue Sep 16 11:38:18 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521470308.005 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 SHANG ARCHAEOLOGY 127 By 1915 Luo Zhenyu had established that antique dealers obtained their supplies of oracle bones from farmers near modern Anyang (see Map 3.1). Whether the place the bones came from was viewed as anything other than a source of more oracle bones, however, depended on ideas brought to China by field archaeology, a Western discipline that met a favorable reception in the westernizing climate of the May Fourth Movement. The new discipline's potential for illuminating the Chinese past was demonstrated in the early 1920s by the Swedish geologist J.
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