Cotsen Institute of Archaeology

The Late Bronze Age (ca. 1000-250 BC) was a crucial period during which the Chinese Classics came into being and famous thinkers such as Confucius (ca. 551-479 BC) laid the intellectual foundations of traditional Chinese civilization. Complementing and often challenging the surviving writings, Lothar von Falkenhausen develops a self-consciously archaeological perspective on the social conditions in this time. He analyzes clan and lineage organization, social stratification, gender and ethnic differences, as well as social change over time. Falkenhausen not only presents new data, but also thinks about these data in new ways, emphasizing the nexus between the social order and ritual practices and introducing anthropological approaches as-yet rarely tested in China.