Ancient Central China: Centers and Peripheries along the Yangzi River
Author(s): Rowan K. Flad (Author), Pochan Chen (Author)
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publication Date: 14 Mar. 2013
Language: English
Print length: 428 pages
ISBN-10: 0521899001
ISBN-13: 9780521899000
Book Description
Ancient Central China provides an up-to-date synthesis of archaeological discoveries in the upper and middle Yangzi River region of China, including the Three Gorges Dam reservoir zone. It focuses on the Late Neolithic (late third millennium BC) through the end of the Bronze Age (late first millennium BC) and considers regional and interregional cultural relationships in light of anthropological models of landscape. Rowan K. Flad and Pochan Chen show that centers and peripheries of political, economic and ritual activities were not coincident, and that politically peripheral regions such as the Three Gorges were crucial hubs in interregional economic networks, particularly related to prehistoric salt production. The book provides detailed discussions of recent archaeological discoveries and data from the Chengdu Plain, Three Gorges and Hubei to illustrate how these various components of regional landscape were configured across Central China.
Editorial Reviews
Review
‘Ancient Central China is replete with up-to-date information (especially on Sichuan and the Three Gorges) and the authors’ work at Zhongba and on the Chengdu Plain is a shining example of what is possible in Chinese archaeology. The history of scholarship in the region is especially rich and the authors’ synthesis of palaeo-climate and geography is the best I know of in Chinese archaeology … Ancient Central China contains simultaneously some of the most stimulating theoretical proposals in Chinese archaeology and a much needed synthesis of an understudied region presented in provocative fashion.’ Antiquity
Book Description
An up-to-date synthesis of archaeological discoveries in the upper and middle Yangzi River region of China, including the Three Gorges Dam reservoir zone.
About the Author
Rowan K. Flad is Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University. He has received grants from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Luce Foundation, the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation and the American Philosophical Foundation, among others. He has been a traveling lecturer for the Archaeological Institute of America and has published extensively on archaeology in China in many edited volumes and journals, including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Current Anthropology, The Holocene, Antiquity, the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, the Journal of Field Archaeology, Asian Perspectives, the Journal of East Asian Archaeology, the Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Kaogu and Nanfang Minzu Kaogu. He co-edited a book on specialization in the series Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, and is the author of Salt Production and Social Hierarchy in Ancient China: An Archaeological Investigation of Specialization in China’s Three Gorges, published by Cambridge University Press in 2011.
Pochan Chen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at National Taiwan University. His major research focus is the Neolithic to Han Dynasty of China and Neolithic Taiwan. He has published several papers in journals such as Asian Perspectives, Bianjiang Minzu Kaogu Yu Minzu Kaoguxue Jikan, Diaro de Campo, Kaogu, Nanfang Minzu Kaogu, Nanfang Wenwu, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Xinshixue and Yanyeshi Yanjiu, and in book sections of Salt Archaeology of China, Volume 1, and Sel, Eau et Forêt: D’hier à Aujourd’hui.
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