Lifeways in Bronze Age China

Academic interest in the Chinese Bronze Age has tended to focus on larger scale social processes, such as state formation, urbanization and technological change. This symposium seeks to broaden the understanding of the period by exploring the smaller scale processes that people engaged with in the daily lives. By covering Bronze Age lifeways, we hope to highlight the significance of bottom-up processes and their recursive relationship with the larger social transformations occurring at this time. This symposium will introduce recent archaeological discoveries relating to daily lived experience in Bronze Age China, covering topics such as houses and household activity, craft production, daily ritual practice, cooking and other aspects of quotidian life.