A New Approach to the Anyang Hsi-Pei-Kang Late Shang Royal Cemetery: A Social Archaeological Perspective

Summary

This presentation argues that the decision of the locations of the so-called royal tombs of the Anyang Hsi-Pei-Kang cemetery involved various social-strategic concerns. Although badly robbed, the excavations of the tombs yielded rich grave good assemblages, allowing archaeologists to approach to various elements of the theocratic authority of the late Shang kings. The reconstruction of the formation process of the cemetery has been attempted in the hope that the tombs can be assigned to the kings whose reigns are recorded in Shiji and in Zhúshū Jìnián (the Bamboo annals). Drawing upon an original novel reconstruction of the relative chronology of the tombs, we examined spatial relationships between them at each phase of the formation process of the cemetery, particularly in terms of which pre-existing tombs the mourners were ‘designed’ to see and in what way, and have analytically revealed some distinct patterns. By comparing the timings of the implementations of those strategies with the genealogical relationships between the kings that were recorded in Shi-ji, we have investigated and reconstructed the social-strategic implications of the selections of those strategies in relation to their historical-contextual backgrounds.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22160