Bronze-casting molds (c. 200 BCE) unearthed at Kal-tong, Wanju, South Korea (image source: Jeonju National Museum)
Crossing the Yellow Sea: The Exchange of Metalworking Knowledge and Technologies the Interconnected Ancient East Asian World
Chris Kim
ISAW Visiting Assistant Professor
This lecture will take place in person at ISAW.
Registration is required at THIS LINK.
The first regions in East Asia to develop sophisticated metalworking traditions from the second millennium BCE onward were the various cultural and political centers of Inner China, including the historical Shang and Zhou dynasties based in the Yellow River valley. Beyond this world across the Yellow Sea, the interconnected societies of Northeast China, the Korean Peninsula, and southern Japan - the frontiers of the Sinitic world in antiquity - engaged in the exchange of bronze and later iron metallurgy both with one another and with different regions in China in the first millennium BCE. This talk explores the richness, intensity, and complexity of this cross-cultural exchange, particularly in light of recent advances in archaeometry that allow us to go beyond tracing the trade and circulation of objects within this wider region to look deeper at how local societies actively selected and folded technological knowledge into their own local lifeways and socio-political systems.
Chris Kim (ISAW, NYU) is a historian of early China whose interdisciplinary research draws on history, paleography, and archaeology to investigate state-building, political economy, urbanism, and coinage in the first millennium BCE. His current book project, Building the Qi State, examines the spatial dynamics of state power in the state of Qi in Shandong, eastern China in the context of its rise into a powerful territorial kingdom between c. 700-300 BCE. In addition, he is working on a range of related projects including kingship in the Eastern Zhou dynasty, the origins of coinage in ancient China, and the cross-cultural exchange of metallurgical knowledge in the greater Yellow Sea region of East Asia in antiquity. He received his PhD from Columbia University.
The lecture will be followed by a reception.
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