Memory and Agency in Ancient China
Shaping the Life History of Objects

Applies the 'life history' of objects approach to China's prehistoric, early dynastic and more recent material culture.

Francis Allard (Edited by), Yan Sun (Edited by), Kathryn M. Linduff (Edited by)

9781108472579, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 December 2018

308 pages, 74 b/w illus. 10 maps
26.1 x 18.5 x 2 cm, 0.82 kg

Memory and Agency in Ancient China offers a novel perspective on China's material culture. The volume explores the complex 'life histories' of selected objects, whose trajectories as ginle objects ('biographies') and object types ('lineages') cut across both temporal and physical space. The essays, written by a team of international scholars, analyse the objects in an effort to understand how they were shaped by the constraints of their social, political and aesthetic contexts, just as they were also guided by individual preference and capricious memory. They also demonstrate how objects were capable of effecting change. Ranging chronologically from the Neolithic to the present, and spatially from northern to southern mainland China and Taiwan, this book highlights the varied approaches that archaeologists and art historians use when attempting to reconstruct object trajectories. It also showcases the challenges they face, particularly with the unearthing of objects from archaeological contexts that, paradoxically, come to represent the earliest known point of their 'post-recovery lives'.

Introduction: memory and agency in Ancient China: shaping the life histories of objects Francis Allard, Yan Sun and Katheryn M. Linduff
1. Memory, amnesia and the formation of identity symbols in China Gideon Shelach
2. The lives of shovels and bells in early South China: memory, ritual and the power of destination Francis Allard
3. The whole and fragmented lives of jade objects from late Neolithic Middle Yangzi river burials (ca. 2000 BC) Sascha Priewe
4. The social life of salt in Ancient China from the Late Neolithic to the Han Dynasty Pochan Chen
5. A divergent life history of bronze willow-leaf-shaped swords of Western Zhou China from 11th to c. 10th centuries BCE Yan Sun
6. Bird-pillar basins and cylindrical vessels: object lineage in Ancient China Xiaolong Wu
7. Toiletries and the production of social memory from the warring states through the Han (4th c. BCE–3rd c. CE) Sheri Lullo
8. A biographical approach to the study of the mounted archer motif during the Han Dynasty Leslie Wallace
9. Dynamic between form and material: the bi disc in Western Han noble burial ritual Eileen Lam
10. Crossing the Taiwan Strait: contextualizing and re-contextualizing Taiwan Aboriginal Objects (1895–1980) Du Hui
11. Artifacts that invoke the aura and authority of the ancient Katheryn M. Linduff

Subject Areas: Archaeology by period / region [HDD], Archaeology [HD], Asian history [HBJF], Regional & national history [HBJ], History [HB], Humanities [H]