Shang Dynasty (Archaeology)

1 1 I wish to thank Charles Robertson for all his attention and support during this study and Isabel Cervera for her orientations. I am also grateful to Harry Mount and Jeremy MacClancy for their teachings, as well as to Valeria Camporesi, Felipe Pereda and all the professionals from UAM, because it would have been impossible to create this essay without their instruction. I thank Jesús Carrillo, my Erasmus coordinator, for his flexibility and for suggest me to study at Oxford Brookes, and Moisés Sánchez, who helped me to route my future when I was an adolescent in La Mancha. I appreciate the help of all my classmates along my formation and, above all, the understanding of my family.

A detailed discussion and comparison of the two dynasties - Shang and Zhou - with reference to archaeological findings.

Please note:
If you are a student at any University, and you wish to cite my essay, do so prudently. It has not been published in any journal or paper, and will not be considered a properly peer-reviewed source by your teachers. Instead, I would advise you to bounce off my ideas; use them to deepen your own inquiries into the topic.

Current anthropological approaches to animals have noted that the contemporary Western categories of human and animal are historically particular ones, and that different ontologies can and do organize the categorical and practical relationships between beings in a variety of ways. The ritual use of dogs in ancient China illustrates this point well. At Anyang (ca. 1250-1050 BCE) dogs played a number of roles in the significant doings of both kings and commoners and occupied a unique position in the Shang web of being-patterning with humans in some practices and with other domestic animals in others. The surprising discovery that Anyang mortuary ritual dogs outnumber those found in other contexts and that they are almost exclusively juvenile individuals argues for both the development of the Shang ritual economy and at the same time its basis on more than just an equation of economic expenditure with status. Finally, an epigraphic and zooarchaeological contextualization of dog sacrifice reveals that the Chinese archaeological practice of equating sacrificial deposits with whole interments reveals only the tip of the iceberg and full understanding of animal sacrifice in the Shang and other early complex societies must consider the full range of zooarchaeological deposits and cultural practices involving animals.

Traditional studies of early bronze metallurgy in China have focused on typology, decoration and production methods. The application of new analytical techniques to investigate chemical composition, however, is offering important new insights. The use of one such method (electron probe microanalysis) to study bronze artefacts from the Hanzhong basin in central China shows a level of diversity that implies much greater complexity in the extended landscape networks of the Bronze Age than was previously thought. The ability to appreciate these finds from a new perspective allows progression beyond older, simplistic models, and demonstrates that the Hanzhong region held greater importance within the power structure of Bronze Age Central China than has previously been recognised.

These English psychologists-what is it they want? We find them, voluntarily or involuntarily, ever engaged in the same work, -the work of pushing into the foreground the partie honteuse of our inner world and of seeking for the really operative, really imperative and decisive factor in history just there, where the intellectual pride of man would least wish to find it (for example, in the vis inertiae of custom or in forgetfulness or in some blind and accidental hooking-together and mechanism of ideas or in something purely-passive, automatic, reflexmotion-like, molecular and thoroughly stupid).

Previous archaeometallurgical studies on Bronze Age China mainly focused on finished artefacts, whereas our understanding of copper smelting technology of this period is still limited. This paper, for the first time, presents analytical results of metal production remains from the site of Laoniupo in Guanzhong Plain, central Shaanxi. It reveals that arsenical copper was produced at this site by smelting arsenic-rich polymetallic ores with raw copper or high purity copper ores. The identification of metal production in the Guanzhong Plain is significant for the investigation of regional development and interregional interaction of Bronze Age cultures in China. The possible exploitation of ores from deposits in the Qinling Mountain region during this period is also discussed in this article.

Working for His Majesty represents a feat of outstanding scholarship in the centennial history of studies dealing with late Shāng-dynasty China. Based primarily on oracle-bone inscriptions, jiǎgǔwén 甲骨文, the earliest extant body of Chinese texts dating from the thirteenth to the eleventh century BC, the author delves into the divinatory materials -- notwithstanding their ephemeral and biased nature by origin -- in an all-out pursuit of scholarship on labor mobilization. He does this in ways no one has done before, presenting his findings with lucidity and eloquence.

Just like Indus valley and Mesopotamia, a bronze age civilization also grew in ancient china near the present Chengdu of China in the southwestern province of Sichuan. They had no writing system like other city-states of Northwest China. Chengdu is famous for being the home of China's most famous creatures, the giant pandas. The earliest kingdom in the region was called Shu, which is still the abbreviation for, and a familiar name of, Sichuan. Before a major archaeological discovery in the last century, there was no material proof that this legendary empire referenced in Sima Quin chronicle of the Grand historian ever existed. Even official history books treated this as a legendary tale of "yellow emperor" as a myth while describing the first king as "Cancong", who had exaggeratedly protruding eyes that resembled two sticks; and speculated that it might be connected with doomed Shang Dynasty of the Warring States period. The name Cancong, means "silkworm-bush", was given for his skill in raising silkworms and producing silk. The speculation was ended in 1986, after the workers in a small village called "Sanxingdui" ran across the bronze artifacts of the bygone era. The archeologist pursued this tip and started excavating sites. During this excavation, a statue of real King "Cancong" with protruding eyes

In this brief response to Sun et al.'s (2018) comments on our paper, we re-emphasize that archaeological,  chemical and isotopic evidence are all relevant to the discussion about the metal source of the Shang period with highly radiogenic lead isotope ratios. The southern African bronzes have much lower lead contents and quite different lead isotopic signatures than the Shang bronzes. More importantly, there was no metallurgy of any kind in southern Africa before c.200 CE, so southern Africa cannot possibly be the source of Shang bronze, which date to about 1500 to 1000 BCE.

This paper uses a multi-isotope approach (C, N, S) to explore the social dynamics of early Bronze Age China, focusing on communities within the Central China Plain. Building upon recent research on Yinxu, the last capital of the Shang Dynasty (Cheung et al., 2017a, 2017b), we obtained 49 samples from six contemporaneous sites both within and outside of Yinxu, including sites from the Gansu, Shaanxi, and Henan Provinces. Stable carbon and nitrogen isotopic ratios of an additional 419 individuals, and stable sulfur isotopic ratios of 118 individuals from seven other sites taken from published reports are also included to expand the geographic scope of this study. By including sites outside of Yinxu, this study is able to investigate the cultural contacts and exchanges between Yinxu and other communities, and provide novel insights into the geographic origins of the sacrificial victims found at Yinxu. Our findings are consistent with other scholars' observations that during the late Shang period, Yinxu was one of several cultural centers of Bronze Age China, where goods, ideas, technologies, and people from different cultural groups were gathered and exchanged.

Auroral reports from ancient Chinese records and from Greece and Italy, from historical sources (Bamboo Annals, Tai ping yu lan, Ch'unch'iu period and Aristotle, Anaxagoras, Seneca, Pliny, Livy, respectively) in the 1st millennium B.C., are discussed in relation to the geomagnetic pole (GP) coordinates through archaeomagnetic inclination and declination data. It is shown that the expected auroral oval with its extension to a maximum of radius 30o around the GP occasionally reaches the Chinese / Southern Mediterranean mid latitudes and eastern longitudes: for China 35ο-40ο and 95ο-125ο respectively, and for Greece/Central Italy, 35ο-40ο and 10ο-25ο respectively; two distant regions where two great cultures flourished. Of the nine Chinese records those of 1000-900 B.C., 687 B.C., 193 B.C., 139 B.C., 32 B.C., 30 B.C. and 15 B.C. records are justified by a mid latitude geomagnetic pole which gives certain mid latitude aurorae. For the 166 B.C. and 154 B.C. available archaeomagnetic data the position of the VGP does not justify observation of aurorae. Archaeomagnetic data for Chinese accounts derived from South Korea, Japan and England reduced to mid China location are also used to determine GP at a reduced site of common latitude in China, but due attention and discussion of non-dipole magnetic sources and their calculated drift rates is made, to explain the unattainable observation of aurorae at central Chinese latitudes. Similarly, in southern Eastern Mediterranean area (Greece, Italy) 33 data are used and most are commensurable with the inclined GP towards mid latitudes, included within the auroral oval or at its southern maximum extension taking into account associated errors. Highly acceptable aurorae accounts and problematic ones are explained in terms of smooth or rapid, respectively, changes in the magnetic inclination and declination positions, reinforced by large age errors. Virtual Geomagnetic poles (VGP) for examined regions are ranging between 51o to 71o for latitude and between 1o to 123o for longitude for auroral observation dates of the 1st millennium B.C. to 1st century A.D.

The site known as Yinxu (present day Anyang, Henan, China) is believed to be the last capital of China’s first historical dynasty, Shang (ca. 1600–1046 BC). We use stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis of human bone collagen to reconstruct the dietary practices of 59 humans from the site Xin’anzhuang (XAZ), a residential neighbourhood in Yinxu. By comparing the reconstructed diets with other archaeological and mortuary evidence, the study reveals that the XAZ inhabitants had a varied diet, and that their dietary patterns correlate with certain mortuary practices (e.g. burial orientation, burial goods, etc). This complex internal social stratification suggests that XAZ was consisted of an agglomeration of people of different socio-cultural affiliations, confirming the hypothesis that Yinxu was a vibrant and diverse cultural center in the early Bronze Age China.

Eine Untersuchung der Relation von Geschichtskonzeptionen und Nationalismus in China: Es wird der Frage nachgegangen, inwiefern das "Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronologie Projekt" nationalistisch geprägt war und in welcher Form die archäologischen Ausgrabungen bei Erlitou insbesondere im Sinne der Identifikation der Fundstelle als ehemalige Hauptstadt der Xia-Dynastie zum Zwecke der Bildung einer nationalen Identität herangezogen wurden und werden.

Yoshiyuki Iizuka and Junko Uchida (2014). Electron Microscope Study of the
Yinxu (Anyang) Bronze of Academia Sinica Collection. JEOL NEWS, 49(1), 35-
42.

To understand bronze casting technology in ancient China, a series of electron microprobe study has been carried out on bronze objects from the Yinxu (Anyang) in the Academia Sinica collection. Because oxidation parts of bronzes do not preserve the original structures and chemical compositions, non damaged bronze's interior in polished cross-sections were carefully selected, and then their micro-structure and chemical compositions were investigated. Observed metallurgical structures of bronze are divided in two types; dendrite and granular (annealed) structures. Although the granular structured bronze is not common, it suggests that the heat treatment technique has already been applied in the Yinxu Period. Oxygen was also measured to confirm its condition of the oxidation by EPMA, and 73 samples of arms and vessels were discriminated as well-preserved samples. Most of the Yinxu bronzes are tin (Sn)-bronze with a little amount of lead (Pb). An overall result indicates that the bulk Cu/(Cu+Sn) ratios of the bronzes range from 0.79 to 0.89, and chemical compositions are rather different in type of usages. It indicates that the chemical compositions (mixture ratios of Cu:Sn) of the bronzes were already intentionally controlled for their usages in the Yinxu Period.

ABSTRACT:
This article presents a brief review and analysis of one of the most interesting features of the Sanxingdui Bronze Age culture, which is widespread in the Sichuan province of the PRC – bronze anthropomorphic statues, found in the sacrificial pit JK2. The authors refer to full-size human figures at least 50 cm tall (but not their parts, e.g. heads) assembled from pre-cast details, as “statues”. Smaller items cast in one go, they propose to call “figurines”. The ways of production of anthropomorphic statues are described; they are linked to one of the stages of technological evolution of Sanxingdui bronze casting, and myths and rituals reflected by anthropomorphic statues are discussed.
There are three bronze anthropomorphic statues from Sanxingdui, all three found in the sacrificial pit JK2: a big statue of a man standing on a pedestal, the upper part of a human figure with zoomorphic headdress, and the lower part of a skirt-dressed human figure with bird talons instead of feet, holding two snake-like creatures. Long ears and trunk (or horn) on top of the zoomorphic headpiece and hands of the upper part of the human figure were precast and inserted into the intentionally left holes of the main pour (body, head and headdress) cast in a two-sectional mould. After that, precast details were soldered in place with cover pour. Two snake-like creatures with birds’ heads were precast and brazed to precast feet with birds’ talons, and the latter were fixed in the mould for casting of the lower part of the skirt-dressed human figure. The method of casting of the human figure with zoomorphic headdress and bronze masks of A and C types is the same. The skirt-dressed human figure with talons was produced in the same way as bronze “spirit trees” No 2 and No 1. They all belong to stage II of the technological evolution of Sanxingdui bronze casting.
The skirt-dressed human figure with talons closely resembles representations of Garuda – a personage of Indian mythology. The whole composition may illustrate one of the two episodes, described in ancient Indian epic “Mahabharata”. In one case, Garuda has transported his half-brothers Naga serpents to a nice island amidst the ocean. Another story tells of how Garuda has stolen the elixir of immortality Amrita for Naga, after tearing to pieces two dragons that guarded it, with his talons. The zoomorphic headdress on top of the head of a human figure copies the head of a fictional animal from the lowest level of the so-called “sacred altar”, also found in the JK2 sacrificial pit. It may depict the Lord of the Underworld in his anthropomorphic form, or be the evidence of the existence of a ritual in Sanxingdui, resembling Japanese Gigaku theatre or Cham performance, with this personage as its main hero.

РЕЗЮМЕ
В статье представлены уникальные находки культуры Саньсиндуй, относящейся к эпохе бронзы и распространенной в пров. Сычуань (КНР) – бронзовые антропоморфные статуи, встреченные в жертвенной яме JK2 на эпонимном памятнике. Авторы считают статуями ростовые изображения человека (а не отдельных частей его тела, например, голов) общей высотой не менее 50 см, смонтированные из предварительно отлитых деталей. Отлитые в один прием изваяния меньшего размера они предлагают называть статуэтками. Конструктивные особенности бронзовых антропоморфных статуй Саньсиндуя позволяют синхронизировать время их создания с бытованием бронзовых масок типов A и C, а также бронзовых «деревьев духов» № 2 и № 1, поскольку при их изготовлении применялись одни и те же технологические приемы. Статую человека с птичьими когтями на ногах, в которых зажаты змееподобные существа с птичьими головами, предложено интерпретировать при помощи древнеиндийского мифа о Гаруде. Статуя в зооморфном головном уборе рассматривается как иллюстрация к мистерии о владыке саньсиндуйского подземного мира, подобной по форме современной мистерии цам.

In the 21st century, especially in the United States and most of Europe, most take the ideas of republicanism and formal separation of church and state for granted. The sheer ubiquity of said concepts can and does give rise to the notion that these notions are inherently superior. In this cursory examination, I aim to show, using East Asia as an example, that implementing secular republican systems may be detrimental, even harmful for some cultures.

Bao (Leopard) was the hou-lord of 【合爿】 (reading unknown). His domain presumably belonged to the south-west fringes of the Shang state (at the meeting point of the modern Henan and Shaanxi provinces). Consensus hasn’t been reached yet on the Shang period hou-lord’s authority: it could
be either an appointed officer, or a dependent ruler of somewhat autonomous state, who was enfeoffed by the king or simply submitted to him. Neither of versions can be completely disproved due to the data scarcity, but the case of hou Bao seems to agree better with the latter interpretation: in the oracle bone inscriptions hou Bao plays the role of the Shang king’s loyal ally and vassal, but his domain must have enjoyed considerable level of autonomy from the central government.

This paper focuses on the work habits and motives of the Shang recordkeepers who wrote the divination accounts discovered in 1991 in Pit 3 at Huayuanzhuang East. These scribes, who worked under the patronage of a head of one of the princely households, collaborated with diviners sanctioned under the same mandate and the two professional groups developed and employed technologies to micromanage their workloads economically and to do their jobs coherently and efficiently. The scribes who produced the divination accounts on this homogenous and unified collection of shells and bones demonstrated accurate divination recordkeeping and displayed a unique competency and innovation in how these specialized records were designed, written out, and formally presented. More crucially, the orientation of the divination accounts indicates a control of the materials, attests to scribal literacy, and implies that they were written to be read and consulted.


《如何閱讀花園莊東地H3坑甲骨卜辭》

本文以1991 年花園莊東地H3 坑出土的卜辭記錄為材料，集中探討其商代記事者的工作習慣和動機。這一群史官與另一群卜人同時受僱於當時某一位高權重的王子，兩個專業群體共同開發出一套作業技術並付諸實踐，以經濟簡便的方式具體而微地分工合作，連貫而有效地各自做好本職。這批甲骨刻辭體現出高度的同質性和統一性，反映當時史官已能精準地記錄卜筮內容，而就這些專門記錄的設計、書寫和展現方式所見，他們具備獨特的辦事能力和創造力。更關鍵的是，從刻辭行款走向可見他們對材料的把握，體現了商代史官的知識水平，並暗示刻寫卜辭實為了日後閱讀和翻查之用。

In this essay, we will find out what kind of information do the remains of human sacrifices, ritual bronze vessels and oracle bones provide us about the religion of the Shang Dynasty. At the same time, various theories and debates will also be discussed. Research question: What kind of information about the Shang Dynasty religion can be inferred from the remains of human sacrifices, ritual bronze vessels and oracle bones?

Металлургия Шанской Цивилизации бассейна Хуанхэ отличается развитыми технологиями бронзолитейного производства. Предполагается, что ее формирование было стимулировано сейминско-турбинскими импульсами из Южной Сибири через Синьцзян и Ганьсу. Однако большинство изделий, которые приводят в качестве доказательства этого, относятся к позднешанскому времени. В предшествующее время в Китае было известно эпизодическое использование олова, но легирование происходило, по-видимому, на стадии плавки руды. Технологии сложного литья и легирования оловом в металл, действительно, были привнесены сейминско-турбинскими племенами к началу стадии Эрлитоу III, но распространение этих технологий шло не с запада, а с севера, через Шанси и Ляонин, где типы копий наиболее близки сейминским прототипам и с точки зрения морфологии, и с точки зрения использованных лигатур. Свидетельства этого ограничены небольшим набором ножей, кинжалов и втульчатых копий. Большинство прочих типов имеет местное происхождение. При этом эти изделия формируются на сейминско-турбинской основе, но имеют самобытные формы и были изготовлены в Китае. С этим совпадает широкое распространение оловянного легирования в бассейне Хуанхэ. В рамках радиоуглеродной хронологии это относится ко второй половине 17 в. до н.э., а в рамках китайской исторической хронологии к середине 16 в. до н.э., совпадая с началом Шанской династии. Однако бурное развитие Шанской металлургии было обусловлено не этим импульсом, а местным социально-экономическим развитием. Появление втульчатого копья в Приморье и каменных реплик копий и кинжалов связано не с собственно сейминско-турбинскими бронзами, а с более поздним взаимодействием с Шанской периферией.

The hou-lords’ status and their authority during the late Shang period China in the thirteenth–eleventh centuries BCE remain the point of discussion. Three main hypotheses are put forward. The hou-lords could be either autochthonous leaders of semi-independent polities in the periphery of the Shang state, or ‘feudal’ lords in possession of land granted by the king, or appointed ‘officials’ with limited authority and with more or less determined functions. These hypotheses are now rather problematic due to the data on the names of hou and of their domains. First, the hou names and their domains names both may possess attributes of ethnonyms but these facts show no general tendency. The phenomenon is better explained with peculiar features of ancient Chinese language and writing, such as excessive amount of homonyms, inability to distinguish common words from proper names and to distinguish different types of proper names (place names, personal names, ethnonyms etc.) Cases are too many when we cannot tell whether given proper name is a place name or a personal name, a name of some kinship group or something else. Thus hypothetical connection between hou and kinship groups or primitive polities has no solid ground. Second, Shang period inscriptions refer to hou in style and manner proper for independent or semi-autonomous rulers and not for officials on the king’s service: the way place name is attached to the title argues for the fact that hou actually possessed the land and not just performed certain degree of control over it. Despite other versions cannot be disproved for good, the ‘feudal’ hypothesis should be taken as the main one.

Chinese Bronze Age zooarchaeological data sets have almost exclusively been derived from large, urban centres and often from elite contexts. The Anyang period (ca. 1250-1050 BCE) village site of Guandimiao fills an important lacuna as a small, non-elite, rural site. The large urban sites of the Chinese Bronze Age are thought to have been more centres of animal consumption than of stock rearing, and so, Guandimiao presents the first glimpse of a possible production site. In addition, the near total excavation of the original village affords a rarely fine-grained understanding of context allowing us to distinguish broadly between domestic, ritual-related, and mortuary assemblages. These assemblages show differences in relative quantities of taxa, in body part distribution, bone modification, and taphonomy, giving additional insight into animal-related human behaviour at the site. In addition, a variety of lines of evidence demonstrates a large dog-related taphonomic bias, a subject that is generally ignored in Chinese zooarchaeology. Finally, the survivorship curves for pig and cattle generally show gradual attrition with a significant proportion of older animals, in contrast with contemporaneous Shang urban sites. This fact, plus the fact that the sex analysis performed on the pig mandibles demonstrated that they were nearly all female, supports the hypothesis that Guandimiao was a site of livestock raising and origin point for urban provisioning.

The zhao-mu 昭穆 system has been frequently written about for over two thousand years, but much remains unclear about it. This paper discusses this system from its earliest possible origins to the Han, including an extended discussion on the posthumous names of the Shang Kings.

A set of XII cent. B.C. oracle bone inscriptions found in the ruins of ancient Shang state capital narrates on bestowing a title of hou of the place named Gan (geniune reading unknown) upon the person named Shang. The case of Gan-hou Shang cannot be explained with but a formal recognition and subjection of previously independent peripheral chieftain, it must have been either a feudal-like enfeoffment, or an assignment of an officer. Some evidence suggests, Gan was originally a part of the royal domain, granted later to hou Shang as a fief. Thus, inscriptions shed light on the Shang period enfeoffment system, saying little of its actual scale and characteristics.

Intricate ceramic bronze-casting moulds are among the most significant archaeological remains found at Bronze Age metallurgical workshops in China. Firing temperature was presumably one of the most important technical factors in mould making. However, it has proven difficult to determine the firing temperatures of excavated moulds using existing analytical methods. This study establishes an innovative new method for using Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) to estimate the firing temperature of clay-containing remains. The method is based on the finding that the infrared absorptivity of fired clay minerals, measured at the Si-O-Si stretching resonance band, is negatively correlated with firing temperature. Moulds and mould cores dating to the Early Shang period (sixteenth to fourteenth century BCE) are found to have been fired at extremely low temperatures-as low as 200-300 °C in many instances. These results provide critical new data for understanding the metallurgical technology of ancient China. The production of bronze vessels was the most prominent handicraft industry in Bronze Age China (c. twentieth to fifth century BCE) and was deeply embedded in the ritual and political systems of the Shang and Zhou dynasties. This essential industry has received abundant scholarly attention, including ongoing debates over the location of metal sources 1,2 , distribution networks 3 and casting techniques 4. Researchers have also increasingly focused on the tools used in the bronze production process and, in particular, on the manufacture of the high-performance ceramic moulds that made possible the complex casting methods used in ancient China 5,6. Understanding this mould-making technology is an essential component of the broader effort to understand diachronic change and regional variation in China's metallurgical industries during the Bronze Age. The firing temperature of moulds deserves particular attention, as it is a key technical factor in mould making, capable of significantly influencing the performance of ceramic moulds and mould cores during the bronze-casting process. However, using laboratory analyses to estimate the firing temperatures of excavated moulds and cores has been proved challenging. Initial attempts, based on measurement of moulds' thermal expansion behavior, found that moulds were fired at 900-1050 °C 7 , with some scholars additionally claiming that moulds' firing temperatures were deliberately kept between the decomposition temperature of calcite (850-900 °C) and the sintering temperature of typical clays (950-1000 °C) 8,9. However, research has shown that the thermal expansion method used in these initial analyses may significantly overestimate the firing temperatures of low-fired ceramics-i.e., of ceramics fired below the sintering temperature of clay 10. Recent investigations, using analytical methods better suited to low-fired ceramics, have found that moulds may have been fired at temperatures much lower than initially believed. Using a modified thermal expansion method, moulds and cores from the Western Zhou site of Zhouyuan (eleventh to eighth century BCE) and the Late Shang site of Xiaomintun (thirteenth to eleventh century BCE) were found to have been fired at 550-650 °C or lower 11,12. Additional mould and core samples from Xiaomintun, analyzed using thermoluminescence, were found to have been fired at 600-700 °C 13. Eastern Zhou-period moulds from Xinzheng (eighth-third century BCE) were determined to have been fired below 800 °C, due to the low degree of clay sintering observed by SEM imaging 5. Finally, a large study of 72 moulds from Zhouyuan used Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) to determine that almost all of the moulds had been fired OPEN

In this brief response to Sun et al.'s (2018) comments on our paper, we re-emphasize that archaeological , chemical and isotopic evidence are all relevant to the discussion about the metal source of the Shang period with highly radiogenic lead isotope ratios. The southern African bronzes have much lower lead contents and quite different lead isotopic signatures than the Shang bronzes. More importantly, there was no metallurgy of any kind in southern Africa before c.200 CE, so southern Africa cannot possibly be the source of Shang bronze, which date to about 1500 to 1000 BCE.