The Oracle Bone Project: Tracing the Spread and Development of Oracle Bone Divination in Ancient China
Author(s): Katherine Brunson; Zhipeng Li; Rowan Flad
Year: 2016
Summary
Oracle bones—animal bones used for pyro-osteomantic divination rituals in East Asia—are one of the most important types of bone artifacts in Chinese Neolithic and Bronze Age archaeological sites and the source of inscriptions containing the earliest writing in ancient China. In the Oracle Bone Project, we are creating a database of Chinese oracle bones in order to study the origins of oracle bone divination rituals, their spread across Asia during the Neolithic, the types of animal bones used to make oracle bones, and the ultimate development of oracle bone divination as a central part of Shang Dynasty royal religious practices. We present the results of our first season of data collection and share the open access multi-language database available on Open Context (opencontext.org).
Cite this Record
The Oracle Bone Project: Tracing the Spread and Development of Oracle Bone Divination in Ancient China. Katherine Brunson, Zhipeng Li, Rowan Flad. Presented at The 81st Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Orlando, Florida. 2016 ( tDAR id: 404819)
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Keywords
General
China
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Open Access Databases
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Zooarchaeology
Geographic Keywords
East/Southeast Asia
Spatial Coverage
min long: 66.885; min lat: -8.928 ; max long: 147.568; max lat: 54.059 ;