ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the first Bronze Age civilizations of the Yellow and Yangtze river valleys. It sketches what archaeology has to offer the historian and tries to demystify arguments from material evidence by laying out their reasoning concretely. China’s first government-sponsored archaeological excavation began in 1928 at Anyang, a site chosen because inscriptions found there had recently been shown to come from the last nine kings of Shang or Yin, a dynasty previously known only from transmitted texts. Archaeology in China thus began as a text-driven enterprise, an exploration of an ancient world already familiar from later texts, and it has encountered all the usual problems of relating the sometimes incommensurable evidence of texts and material culture. But a succession of startling finds has increasingly turned its focus to questions arising from its own discoveries. The early Bronze Age civilizations of the Yangtze region, for example, which are not mentioned in transmitted texts, are a purely archaeological phenomenon. The chapter begins with a brief remark on text-aided archaeology, turns to a history of major discoveries and of the changes they have made in the way we visualize ancient China, and ends by mentioning a few outstanding problems.
