Lunch Club provides affiliates of the Stanford Archaeology Center with a community-oriented forum for engagement with current issues in archaeology. On May 7, 2025,  we will host Dr.Feng Li from Columbia University.

Abstract:

With regard to the production of bronze objects in early China, past scholarship has favored a centralization model that emphasized the role of a number of central worships controlled by the Shang or Zhou kings. This paper proposes that there was a major shift at the beginning of the Western Zhou to a decentralized formation of production organization in which the royal house, regional states, and the elite lineages all shared an important part. The paper presents multiple lines of evidence from archaeology and paleography to demonstrate that royal dominance of the bronze industry in the late Bronze-Age was instead achieved through controlling the process of collection and distribution of the copper material.