Ancient Sichuan: The Origins and Development of Complex Society in the Chengdu Plain

Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies presents Rowan Flad.

Speaker:
Rowan Flad, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University

The Sichuan Basin in China has been a major breadbasket and population center for Chinese states and empires since the late fourth century BC. Despite this, the region has only recently become an intense focus of archaeological research as it has become clear, based on accidental finds and discoveries made in the course of development projects, that a complex civilization developed that predated the earliest historical records that document societies in the area. Most famous were the discoveries at Sanxingdui in 1986 of two sacrificial pits, which contained gold, bronze, ivory, jade, and other material remains of this lost civilization. Even with these tremendous finds, however, only in the past decade has systematic research focused on trying to document the broader social and political context within which these pits were buried, and the conditions that led up to the establishment of Sanxingdui. Professor Flad will review some of this recent work and examine the process by which the Chengdu Plain was first occupied.

Rowan Flad is associate professor of anthropology at Harvard University. He received his BA in anthropology at the University of Chicago, and an MA and PhD in archaeology from the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on the archaeology of ancient China from a comparative perspective, particularly production and technology, mortuary analysis, archaeological landscapes, interregional interaction, and animal and plant domestication. He has been conducting archaeological fieldwork primarily in the Three Gorges and the Sichuan Basin of China’s Yangzi River valley since 1999, and has recently completed a major archaeological survey project in the Chengdu Plain.