Social Memory and State Formation in Early China

A thought-provoking book on the archaeology of power, knowledge, social memory, and the emergence of classical tradition in early China.

Min Li (Author)

9781107141452, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 May 2018

582 pages, 113 b/w illus. 34 maps 3 tables
26.2 x 18.5 x 3.3 cm, 1.4 kg

'Professor Li's monograph is a direct and canny intervention in the central debate in the archaeology of pre-imperial China, that is, the debate over the relationship between canonical literary-historical accounts of early polities and archaeological evidence for the extent and nature of these polities. The brilliance of Professor Li's approach is that it situates the emergence of accounts of the past (including those literary-historical accounts) in a richly detailed presentation of cultural exchange, urban development and decline, and population movement in the millennia before the emergence of writing … the book will be greeted as a major achievement, both for its confident control of the sources and for its rigorous theoretical approach to the problem of cultural memory-formation.' David Schaberg, University of California, Los Angeles

In this book, Li Min proposes a new paradigm for the foundation and emergence of the classical tradition in early China, from the late Neolithic through the Zhou period. Using a wide range of historical and archaeological data, he explains the development of ritual authority and particular concepts of kingship over time in relation to social memory. His volume weaves together the major benchmarks in the emergence of the classical tradition, particularly how legacies of prehistoric interregional interactions, state formation, urban florescence and collapse during the late third and the second millenniums BCE laid the critical foundation for the Sandai notion of history among Zhou elite. Moreover, the literary-historical accounts of the legendary Xia Dynasty in early China reveal a cultural construction involving social memories of the past and subsequent political elaborations in various phases of history. This volume enables a new understanding on the long-term processes that enabled a classical civilization in China to take shape.

Foreword
1. Wen Ding: gaging the weight of political power
2. Frames of reference: multiple classifications of space
3. Before the Central Plains: the pinnacle of Neolithic development
4. The Longshan transition: political experimentation and expanding horizons
5. The rise of the Luoyang Basin and the production of the first bronze Ding vessels
6. The rise of the Henei Basin and the limit of Shang hegemony
7. The rise of the Guanzhong Basin and the birth of history
8. The world of Yu's tracks: a blueprint for political experimentation
9. Conclusion: the emergence of the classical tradition
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Archaeology [HD], Asian history [HBJF]