David Cohen: Eastern China in the Early Bronze Age and the Search for the "Great City Shang"

The Departments of Anthropology and East Asian Languages and Cultures Presents: 

David Cohen

(Boston University)

Thursday, February 24, 2011

5:00 pm

Glenn Black Laboratory of Archaeology

Auditorium (GL 101)

Eastern China in the Early Bronze Age and the Search for “Great City Shang”

The origins of the Shang dynasty (ca. 1600-1045 BC) and of the great Bronze Age civilization it produced have been subjects long debated by archaeologists and historians studying ancient China. One central issue in these debates is the location of “Da Yi Shang,” or “Great City Shang”— a city that is thought to have been the political center of the Shang royal lineage in its predynastic stage (before 1600 BC) and then to have remained the principal ancestral cult center of the Shang kings throughout the dynastic period. Even as the Shang political capital moved a number of times across the landscape of the middle Yellow River region, the Shang kings would always return to Da Yi Shang to perform “telling” rituals to their highest ancestors. A traditional, historiographic view places Great City Shang in eastern Henan province, and this talk will show how archaeology can add support to this view. In doing this, however, we also consider that locating Great City Shang is not only an historical question, but an anthropological one as well, for it ties into other issues we will explore in this talk concerning Shang identity, Shang relationships with surrounding polities, and ethnic formation processes during the time period of state formation and urbanization on the North China Plain, and in particular, the Shang’s relationships with groups in the lower Yellow River region known later as the “Eastern Yi.” 

David Cohen (PhD 2001 Harvard University) is a specialist in Chinese archaeology. With a twenty year background of field research at sites in North and South China, his research covers a wide range of issues in Neolithic and Bronze Age archaeology, including the origins of complexity and the beginnings of the early Bronze Age Shang dynasty, ethnicity and state formation, ancient Chinese urbanism, human adaptations during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, and the origins of rice and millet agriculture. Dr. Cohen has excavated a number of Neolithic and Bronze Age sites in the Yellow River region, and he is currently working on hunter-gatherer and early Neolithic village sites in the Middle Yangzi River region, where he and members of the Early Rice Agriculture Project team have recently dated the earliest pottery in the world at over 18,000 years ago. Over the past ten years, Dr. Cohen has helped establish a major research institute for East Asian archaeology at Boston University, where he is also managing the development of an international, collaborative, comprehensive, multilingual bibliographic database of East and Southeast Asian archaeology. He serves as an advisor to PhD students in Asian archaeology and has taught general archaeology and Chinese archaeology courses as a Lecturer or Adjunct Assistant Professor at Boston University and Harvard.