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Afterword The Invention of Chinese Civilization Throughout this book I have been at pains to qualify what I write. Myefforts are more than an abundance of scholarly caution or a nod to contemporary academic fashion. As a non-Chinese researcher writing about the early Bronze Age, I am acutely aware that my assumptions are not the same as those of my Chinese peers. By choice I have placed information about the earliest historiographic traditions into a series of boxes labeled "Mythic Narratives" and "Myths of the Xia." Following the good lead of other scholars (Robert Bagley, for one), I have tried to reserve the term "Shang" for naming the literate polity that flourished at Anyang in the last centuries of the second millennium B.e.E., rather than assume that antecedent and contemporaneous archaeological cultures were also Shang. So I write of the roots of the Shang in both the Erligang and Erlitou Cultures, respectively, without making any final judgments as to the specific ancestors of the Late Shang kings. So, too, I have characterized other cultures usually lumped under the broad rubric of "Shang civilization" as episodes in the early Bronze Age preceding or contemporary with the Shang. Thus, "Shang" is not an early synonym of "China," and the latter awaits its invention in later periods. In moving through the archaeological sequence from Erlitou to Yinxu, common features and linkages that show growth are emphasized in each chapter. From the perspective of material culture, there is considerable similarity between the elite of Erlitou and that ofYinxu, as well as between their respective commoner populations. (Writing, and the information it brings us, however, marks one major cleavage in this material record. The meager traces of literacy prior to Wu Ding c. 1250 set the stage for the eventual, inevitable discovery of its initial stages.) This story has two aspects: the growth of a culture over the second millennium B.e.E. from Erlitou to Yinxu, and the diverse impacts that culture had on its neighbors. In every case and in each period, the stories of the neighbors have only begun to come into focus, usually around a single The Invention of Chinese Civilization 265 discovery or a few finds, with little by way of regional context. Surely every regional development we have encountered, from the settlements of the Lower Xiajiadian Culture (contemporary with Erlitou) to those of the Chengdu basin (contemporary with Yinxu) , will eventually be fleshed out in all of their variety and complexity. Nonetheless, at the moment, no region can approach the quality and quantity of data now known from the key sites in Henan, which remain the focus of this book. I have been watching these stories unfold since the 1970s, when I entered graduate school and began to read the archaeological journals month after month. To their credit, Chinese archaeologists have published most of their work in a timely way. This book could not have been written without new, formal reports of excavations at Erlitou, Zhengzhou, Panlongcheng, Xin'gan, and Sanxingdui that appeared in recent years. And to my knowledge, most finds of the 19S0s through the 1990s have been exploited as appropriate: clues have been pursued, and small excavations have often become large ones. The richest sites have in fact become permanent excavations-Anyang, most obviously (see Box 12), but also Erlitou, Zhengzhou, Yanshi, Wucheng, Zhouyuan, Sanxingdui, and now Jinsha. The current generation of archaeologists in the field is in hot pursuit of many parts of the larger puzzles posed by every site. Even so, unexpected discoveries will also appear in the next decade, and will once again stretch our theories and challenge our imaginations. The discovery of a previously unknown large walled settlement literally under the feet of the Anyang Work Team in 1998 (see Box 13) should make us all realize that even the best-known sites are still not thoroughly understood. All of this evidence is seen in China as a part of the long story of Chinese civilization. I would prefer to think of it as a two-part story, as noted above, each with different relationships to historic Chinese civilization . The sequence of Bronze Age cultures centered in Henan (the North China macroregion) yields over time to the historical narrative of the second historic early state, the Zhou. And once we enter that period, the first millennium B.C.E., we are confidently on the trajectory of the origins of Chinese civilization. As I see it, the latter was invented...

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