New materials and new insights for our understanding of the First Emperor's Mausoleum and early imperial China

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "New materials and new insights for our understanding of the First Emperor's Mausoleum and early imperial China" at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Rich material remains from the Qin First Emperor’s mausoleum complex – some well-known but others under-appreciated – are revolutionising our view of this early phase of empire in ancient China. This session provides an opportunity to combine multiple disciplinary approaches to material evidence, spanning pottery and bronze, but also including iron, gold, silver, and wood to which less attention has been paid before. We aim to investigate the use of natural resources, technological know-how, and state-level organisation, with a view to understanding how these all offer insight into early imperial China. We expect this session to foster new methodologies and theoretical frameworks with relevance to our understanding of the Qin First Emperor and early Empire in China, to the wider study of major changes across Eurasia in the first millennium BCE and to the study of other early complex societies.