Archaeological Research in Shangqiu, Henan Province, China

ICEAACH is home to the American team of the Sino-American archaeological field project, Investigations into Early Shang Civilization, with Prof. Robert E. Murowchick (ICEAACH Director) serving as the Co-Principal Investigator of the project and organizer of the geophysical team and Dr. David Cohen (ICEAACH) as one of the main excavators for the American side. Prof. Zhang Changshou 张长寿 of the Institute of Archaeology (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) is Co-Principal Investigator and head of the Chinese team. The goal of this long-standing project, which was initiated in 1990 by the late Prof. K.C. (Kwang-chih) Chang 张光直 of Harvard University, has been to uncover early Bronze Age remains related to the ancestral ritual center of the Shang Dynasty’s kings known as Da Yi Shang大邑商, or “Great City Shang.” The investigations are centered in the Shangqiu 商丘 region of eastern Henan Province, China, which is an area blanketed with some of the thickest flood deposits of the Yellow River, with alluvium over 10 meters deep covering archaeological sites in some places. Because of this, the project has searched for traces of the early Shang civilization employing an interdisciplinary program of geoarchaeological coring and landscape reconstruction, geophysical remote sensing, and archaeological excavation.

The Shangqiu Region

The Shangqiu area is an historically rich region with archaeological remains from the Neolithic period through the Bronze Age and historical periods (the Kaifeng 开封 capital of the Northern Song 宋 Dynasty is nearby). The Early Shang project has focused on this region because traditionally it has been thought to be the homeland of the Shang 商 kings dating from the Shang’s pre-dynastic period (ca. 2000-1600 BC). It was here that the Shang lineage grew in power, eventually becoming recognized as a hegemonic dynasty. Although the political capital of the Shang kings during the dynastic period (ca. 1600-1045 BC) moved many times across the landscape, the traditional view holds that the region of Shangqiu (literally “Ruins of Shang”) remained the site of the royal lineage’s premier ancestral ritual center, Great City Shang, with the Shang kings frequently returning there to perform some of the most sacred rituals to their ancestors, the former kings and predynastic founders of the royal clan.

Pioneer Research

The Early Shang project has played an historically important role in the development of collaborative research in field archaeology in China. With fieldwork beginning in 1991, it was a pioneer international archaeological research project in China and among the very first with foreign archaeologists allowed to excavate there. The founder of the Early Shang project, the late Prof. K.C. (Kwang-chih) Chang 张光直, recognized that the project would set precedents for future collaborative archaeological investigations in China (the project is still affiliated with the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University). One of the most important impacts of the project and Prof. Chang’s way of thinking was the introduction of broadly multi-disciplinary and collaborative field methodologies into China, including geophysics, geoarchaeology, remote sensing, and archaeobotanical studies. The project also demonstrated the practicality of consistent application of field techniques that have now become much more commonplace in China, including dry screening, soil sampling, and flotation, as well as systematic regional coring. Graduate training, as well, was a major aspect of the project, which produced two doctoral dissertations: the first, on Holocene landscape reconstruction at Shangqiu, by Dr. Jing Zhichun 荆志淳 (1994) at the University of Minnesota under Prof. George “Rip” Rapp, and the second, by Dr. David J. Cohen (2001), at Harvard University under Prof. K.C. Chang, on the early Bronze Age Yueshi 岳石 Culture and the archaeology of ethnicity in the predynastic Shang period. Dr. Leng Jian 冷健 of Washington University in St. Louis served as a post-doctoral researcher on the project, and Dr. Li Yung-ti’s 李永迪 (2003) dissertation work at Harvard on Anyang 安阳 bronze foundries could also trace its roots to his many seasons of fieldwork on the project alongside Dr. Tang Jigen 唐际根, Director of the Anyang Field Station of the Institute of Archaeology. Other key participants in the project include Prof. Gao Tianlin 高天麟, Prof. George Rapp, Jr., Dr. David Cist, Dr. Denis Reidy, Dr. Gao Libing, Mr. Zhang Guanshi, Dr. Vincent Murphy, Dr. Robert Regan, Prof. Yuan Jing 袁靖, Prof. Gary Crawford, and Prof. Gyoung-Ah Lee. A bilingual monograph report covering nearly a decade of fieldwork by the project is currently in production. Details of the Shangqiu Project can be found in a number of publications.

Next: Geoarchaeology and Geophysics