Summer Report: Roderick Campbell on Reconstructing the Shang Economy

By Roderick B. Campbell
09/08/2014

Despite nearly 100 years of archaeological work and millennia of textual analysis, very little of substance is known about the economy of ancient China’s Shang dynasty. Aiming to help fill this lacuna, I have been working on a bone-working site of massive proportions at Anyang, the last capital of the Shang dynasty. The enormous consumption of cattle evidenced by the nearly 50 metric tons of bone excavated from the site suggests the importance of the cattle economy to the Shang economy. This summer my graduate student Zhang Yan and I travelled across China examining faunal assemblages at important Shang sites beyond the capital and established a collaboration to study the animal remains at Guandimiao, the only well-preserved Anyang period village known (one of China’s top ten discoveries of 2007). This small site will make an ideal contrast with our ongoing project at the capital, and with future collaborations at other sites it is hoped the great cattle network of the Shang will emerge from the dust of history for the first time in 3000 years.