[Dissertation] Isotopic Analysis of Dietary Patterns in Northern China from the Proto-Shang Period to the Qin Dynasty

Author:
MA, Ying

Defended:
2017

School:
Leiden University

Abstract:

The stable isotope ratios of carbon (d13C), nitrogen (d15N) and sulphur (d34S) are measured to examine human diet, social stratification, mobility and animal husbandry practices. Three locations comprising four sites from the Yellow River Valleys of north China are investigated: Nancheng (Hebei Province), Xishan (Gansu Province), Liyi and Shanren (Shaanxi Province), and this work represents one of the largest and most detailed isotopic research projects ever conducted in China. This thesis focused on time periods and cultures that were previously underrepresented, in the literature such as the early Bronze/Iron Ages to the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC). Further, this thesis found new evidence concerning dietary patterns, social stratification (or lack thereof), animal husbandry practices and human mobility during these formative pre-Qin Empire periods.

Table of Contents:

Chapter 1 – Introduction 

Chapter 2 – Paleodiet Reconstruction and Stable Isotope Ratio Analysis

Chapter 3 – Introduction to the Cultural Prehistory and History of China

Chapter 4 – Isotopic Perspectives (d13C, d15N, d34S) of Diet, Social Complexity, and Animal Husbandry during the Proto-Shang Period (ca. 2000 – 1600 BC) of China

Chapter 5 – Reconstructing Diet of the Early Qin (ca. 700 – 400 BC) at Xishan, Gansu Province, China (Article published in International Journal of
Osteoarchaeology)

Chapter 6 – Tracing the Locality of Prisoners and Workers at the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang: First Emperor of China (259-210 BC) 

Chapter 7 – Conclusions and Future Work

Mind and Body in Early China: Beyond Orientalism and the Myth of Holism

Author:
Edward Slingerland

Publisher:
New York, NY : Oxford University Press

Publication date:
December 2018

Abstract:

Mind and Body in Early China critiques Orientalist accounts of early China as the radical, "holistic" other. The idea that the early Chinese held the "strong" holist view, seeing no qualitative difference between mind and body, has long been contradicted by traditional archeological and qualitative textual evidence. New digital humanities methods, along with basic knowledge about human cognition, now make this position untenable. A large body of empirical evidence suggests that "weak" mind-body dualism is a psychological universal, and that human sociality would be fundamentally impossible without it.

Edward Slingerland argues that the humanities need to move beyond social constructivist views of culture, and embrace instead a view of human cognition and culture that integrates the sciences and the humanities. Our interpretation of texts and artifacts from the past and from other cultures should be constrained by what we know about the species-specific, embodied commonalities shared by all humans. This book also attempts to broaden the scope of humanistic methodologies by employing team-based qualitative coding and computer-aided "distant reading" of texts, while also drawing upon our current best understanding of human cognition to transform our basic starting point. It has implications for anyone interested in comparative religion, early China, cultural studies, digital humanities, or science-humanities integration.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

Chapter One: The Myth of Holism in Early China

PART I: Qualitative Approaches to Concepts of Mind and Body

Chapter Two: Soul and Body: Traditional Archeological and Textual Evidence for Soul-Body Dualism

Chapter Three: Mind-Body Dualism in the Textual Record

PART II: Quantitative Approaches to Concepts of Mind and Body

Chapter Four: Embracing the Digital Humanities: New Methods for Analyzing Texts and Sharing Scholarly Knowledge

PART III: Methodological Issues in the Interpretation of Textual Corpora

Chapter Five: Hermeneutical Constraints: Minds in Our Bodies and Our Feet on the Ground

Chapter Six: Hermeneutical Excesses: Interpretive Missteps and the Essentialist Trap

Conclusion: Naturalistic Hermeneutics and the End of Orientalism

Early Chinese Jades in the Harvard Art Museums

Author:
Jenny F. So

Publication date:
February 2019

Publisher:
Published by Harvard Art Museums
Distributed by Yale University Press

Abstract:
Jade has long played a major role in Chinese social, cultural, and political life. From personal ornamentation to funerary practice, from palace decoration to private devotion, this exquisite material has been revered by commoners and rulers alike. This book charts that vast story, beginning with an in-depth exploration of the stone itself—its unique material qualities and the challenges they raise for workmanship—and then moving chronologically to reveal exactly how jade developed its special moral, ritual, and political significance over millennia in China. The book draws particular attention to the peoples and the communities who quarried and worked the material, passing on their knowledge in a tradition that now spans Neolithic times to the present day.

This sweeping narrative is told in part through high-quality examples selected from Harvard’s Grenville L. Winthrop Collection, which includes some of the finest examples of ancient or archaizing jades outside China. The volume highlights around one hundred of these jades, carefully chosen for the ways in which they help advance the broader historical narrative the book provides. Interwoven through the book’s main chapters, the Winthrop objects are further explored through engaging catalogue entries that detail the latest available information based on conservation analysis and archaeological finds.

Blossom on the Run: A Han Dynasty Adventure

Authors:
Michael Nylan & Robert J. Litz

Publisher: 
Metron Publications

Publication date:
July 21, 2016

Abstract:

This is Volume One of a planned trilogy. One morning in Han dynasty China (206 BC - 220 AD), a girl of eleven is waking up... The day Meike grew up started out like most. She woke to the songs of mockingbirds in the camellia tree. She could hear Ahmei, the cook, in the forecourt bang a pot over the stove. She could smell smoke from Ahmei’s fire and from a hundred others in their crowded district. If she concentrated, she could smell other things too – earth still damp from last night’s rain, peppers soaking in a vat, and something she couldn’t quite name riding the breeze that stirred the bamboo in the courtyard and trickled in through her latticed window. The first light that peeked over the roof-tiles of the east wing of the family compound made the soft green of the spring bamboo almost glow. A softer light caressed the petals of the plum blossom sprig in the vase on the table beneath her window. Her name, Meike, with its soft “may” and harder “kuh,” meant Plum Blossom – soft petals, hard branch – and every Spring, on Meike’s birthday, her mother placed a cutting in her room. In a few minutes, Ahmei would call her name, then call again when Meike didn’t hop out of bed as ordered. She knew that if she waited, her father would creep in, slowly lift her cover, then grab her belly in a tickling claw. But then, all of a sudden, she had this unsettling feeling that today would be different.

ATTN: This is Volume One of a planned trilogy, which was interrupted by the sudden demise of Robert J. Litz.

The Chu Silk Manuscripts from Zidanku, Changsha (Hunan Province): Volume One: Discovery and Transmission

Author:
Li Ling

Translator and editor: 
Lothar von Falkenhausen

Publisher:
The Chinese University Press

Publication date:
June 2020

Abstract:

The Silk Manuscripts from Zidanku 子彈庫, Changsha (Hunan) are the only pre-imperial Chinese manuscripts on silk found to date. Dating to the turn from the fourth to the third centuries BC (Late Warring States period), they contain several short texts concerning basic cosmological concepts in a diagrammatic arrangement and surrounded by pictorial illustrations. As such, they constitute a unique source of information complementing and going beyond what is known from transmitted texts.

This is the first in a two-volume monograph on the Zidanku manuscripts, reflecting almost four decades of research by Professor Li Ling of Peking University. While the philological study and translation of the manuscript texts is the subject of Volume II, this first volume presents the archaeological context and history of transmission of the physical manuscripts. It records how they were taken from their original place of interment in the 1940s and taken to the United States in 1946; documents the early stages in the research on the finds from the Zidanku tomb and its reexcavation in the 1970s; and accounts for where the manuscripts were kept before becoming the property, respectively, of the Arthur M. Sackler Foundation, New York (Manuscript 1), and the Freer and Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian Institution (Manuscripts 2 and 3). Superseding previous efforts, this is the definitive account that will set the record straight and establish a new basis for future research on these uniquely important artifacts.

[Dissertation] Shaping the Formless: Debates over Buddhist Images in Medieval China, Ca. 300-700

Author:
Lee, Kwi Jeong

School:
Princeton University

Degree date:
2018

Advisor:
Teiser, Stephen F.

Abstract:

This dissertation explores how and why Buddhist cultic images fueled controversy among literati circles from the fourth through seventh centuries in China. This study draws on a wide range of sources in classical Chinese, including essays, letters, memorials, edicts, and court debates, as well as Buddhist texts translated from Indian languages and authored in Chinese, to uncover the points of debate and the debaters’ shifting presuppositions. These sources are used to show that both proponents and critics believed that Buddhist cultic objects were vital, complicated components of what they thought was notable about Buddhism. The dissertation also argues that while the ostensible subject of the debates may have been the role of cultic objects in Buddhist practice, nevertheless the discussion covered other important points of contention, including Buddhahood, the material and institutional foundations of Buddhism, the tenet of emptiness, and the dynamics of Buddhist practice. This dissertation analyzes this multivocality of cultic objects and discusses pre-Buddhist and Buddhist conceptions of images (xiang 象). Within this framework, the dissertation suggests that proponents of Buddhist positions were keenly aware of the distinction between cultic images and the formless referents of those images. This study notes the historical continuities between indigenous, pre-Buddhist discourses and the later Buddhist conceptualization of images, while also underlining understandings based on the newly imported religion. It argues that interreligious debates over Buddhist images prompted Buddhist apologists to formulate a fuller soteriological account about the meaning and function of cultic images, resulting in a more extensive, sophisticated theory than that supplied by earlier Chinese Buddhist canonical traditions.