Inscribing Behaviors on Oracle Turtle Plastrons: A New Method to Analyze Tributary Networks of Late Shang China (c. 1250 BCE–1046 BCE)

Summary

Processed from turtle shells and bovid scapulae, oracle bones were massively exploited by the ruling house of the late Shang Dynasty for divination. As opposed to traditional scholarship that holds primary interest in inscriptions engraved on these bones, I consider late Shang divination in entirety as a technological process that proceeds from the preparation and delivery of bone material via tributary networks all the way to bones’ after-use discard into pits. By switching the attention to the least examined pre-divination and post-divination stages, I focus on the texts of marginal inscriptions, the data of the used turtle plastrons and the records of stratigraphy recovered from Pit YH127 and Pit H3 at Yinxu. I argue that since regional tribute payers, capital scribes and diviners were made bound by the tributary networks of oracle turtles, their major behavioral patterns that aimed to facilitate the provision of turtle shells for divination would have been "recorded" by the altered materiality of the shells at each step of change. To detect and reconstruct such behavioral patterns and the physicality of divination can deepen our understandings of the groups that attended the industry of oracle bones, and thus the nature of oracle bones as well.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21128