Western Zhou Ritaul Bronzes

The thousands of ritual bronze vessels discovered by China's archaeologists serve as the major documentary source for the Western Zhou dynasty (1045-771 B.C.). These vessels contain long inscriptions full of detail on subjects as diverse as the military history of the period, the bureaucratic structure of the royal court, and lawsuits among the gentry. Moreover, being cast in bronze, the inscriptions preserve exactly the contemporary script and language. Shaughnessy has written a meticulous and detailed work on the historiography and interpretation of these objects. By demonstrating how the inscriptions are read and interpreted, Shaughnessy makes accessible in English some of the most important evidence about life in ancient China.

Millions upon millions of salmon and steelhead once filled California streams, providing a plentiful and sustainable food resource for the original peoples of the region. But over the years, dams and irrigation diversions have reduced natural spawning habitat from an estimated 6,000 miles to fewer than 300. River pollution has also hit hard at fish populations, which within recent decades have diminished by 80 percent. One species, the San Joaquin River spring chinook, became extinct soon after World War II. Other species are nearly extinct. This volume documents the reasons for the decline; it also offers practical suggestions about how the decline might be reversed. The California salmon story is presented here in human perspective: its broad historical, economic, cultural, and political facets, as well as the biological, are all treated. No comparable work has ever been published, although some of the material has been available for half a century. In the richly varied contributions in this volume, the reader meets Indians whose history is tied to the history of the salmon and steelhead upon which they depend; commercial trollers who see their livelihood and unique lifestyle vanishing; biologists and fishery managers alarmed at the loss of river water habitable by fish and at the effects of hatcheries on native gene pools. Women who fish, conservation-minded citizens, foresters, economists, outdoor writers, engineers, politicians, city youth restoring streambeds—all are represented. Their lives—and the lives of all Californians—are affected in myriad ways by the fate of California's salmon and steelhead. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.

This set is the second installation in a three-volume catalog of the Sackler collection of ancient Chinese bronzes at Harvard University, undertaken by some of the premier scholars in the field. Robert W. Bagley's Shang Ritual Bronzes in the Arthur M. Sackler Collections (Arthur M. Sackler Foundation, 1987) and Jenny F. So's forthcoming Eastern Zhou Ritual Bronzes from the Arthur M. Sackler Collections complete the set. Rawson's contribution starts with Volume IIA, a survey of Western Zhou (c.1050-771 B.C.) bronze types, with more emphasis on dating of shapes and designs than on the use or meaning of the vessels. A wealth of appendixes include information on archaeological sites, inscriptions, and detailed laboratory analyses of bronze samples. Volume lib is the catalog itself, with a full-page color photograph of each vessel followed by a detailed description and comparisons with relevant pieces from other collections. Although probably not of much interest to the general public, this work gathers a tremendous amount of information for specialists and researchers.

Recent discoveries of bronze ritual vessels from ancient China provide the ground for this collection of essays, which focus in particular on the nature and patterns of family lineages as seen from these artifacts found in tombs throughout north China. Based on careful readings of the inscriptions on the bronze vessels, the editor and his eight contributors reconstruct the genealogies, kinship structures, political identities, and relationship networks of leading families and individuals from BronzeAge China. The rich scholarship also contributes to our understanding of the archaeology, chronology, warfare, and legal structures of ancient China. "The bronze inscriptions from ancient China are far too important to be left to the specialized archaeologists alone. Professor Shaughnessy and his group of leading practitioners of the arcane art of teasing out the meaning implicit and explicit in these extraordinarily difficult--often only recently discovered--inscriptions allow us to look over their shoulders as they struggle valiantly with some of the richest sources from the earliest stages of Chinese intellectual ethnography and literary culture. This volume provides the kind of handson and welldocumented exploratory philology that opens up a wide field of general discussion concerning an early formative stage of Chinese civilization." --Christoph Harbsmeier, Professor Emeritus of Chinese, University of Oslo

Drawing on a wealth of archaeological data, this study gives a succinct yet comprehensive survey of ancient Chinese bronzes. The book discusses the alloy and mining processes, the casting techniques, and the evolving historical and social background over a two-thousand year period during which the tools, weapons, vessels, musical instruments, and other bronze pieces were produced and used.