Shelach-Lavi Gideon. The Archaeology of Early China: From Prehistory to the Han Dynasty

Cambridge University Press, 2015. — 392 p.This volume aims to satisfy a pressing need for an updated account of Chinese archaeology. It covers an extended time period from the earliest peopling of China to the unification of the Chinese Empire some two thousand years ago. The geographical coverage includes the traditional focus on the Yellow River basin but also covers China’s many other regions. Among the topics covered are the emergence of agricultural communities; the establishment of a sedentary way of life; the development of sociopolitical complexity; advances in lithic technology, ceramics, and metallurgy; and the appearance of writing, large-scale public works, cities, and states. Particular emphasis is placed on the great cultural variations that existed among the different regions and the development of interregional contacts among those societies.Gideon Shelach-Lavi is the Louis Freiberg Professor of East Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has conducted archaeological fieldwork in northeast China since 1995. He is currently heading the Fuxin Regional Archaeological Project. He has published many articles in leading academic journals. His most recent books include Prehistoric Societies on the Northern Frontiers of China: Archaeological Perspectives on Identity Formation and Economic Change during the First Millennium BCE (2009), Chifeng International Collaborative Archaeological Project (coauthor, 2011), and The Birth of Empire: The State of Qin Revisited (coeditor, 2013).