这部由剑桥大学出版社于2012年出版的“中国考古学：从旧石器时代晚期到青铜时代早期”一书是一个长达十多年的研究项目。最初的图书提案是在1997年提交的，然后在2003年进行了修订; 书稿于2010年完成并送交出版社审稿，随后进行为期一年的修改; 书稿的最终版本于2011年提交并被接受。

本书涵盖了中国史前和早期历史两万多年的时期，着重于阐述人类进化的几个基本问​​题。这就是农业和定居的起源，等级社会的起源，以及早期国家和城市的起源。这是一个非常漫长的发展进程，包括了从最晚的旧石器时代的采集-狩猎群体，经过新石器时代的农业村落，到达青铜时代商王朝的演化轨迹。本书展示了该阶段的中国古代社会，如何从简单到复杂、从部落到城市、从“野蛮”到“文明”、从使用简单刻划符号到发明文字的过程。

由于中国考古学领域飞速发展，现有的考古资料非常丰富。为了撰写这本书，我们参观了很多遗址，并与在中国各地进行田野工作的许多考古学家交谈。这些交流大大提高了我们对不同地区新发现的认识。我们尽力涵盖最新的考古资料，直至稿件完成（2011年）。本书中大量的考古资料和解释来源于我们自己近20年的研究项目，涉及到与许多学者和学生的国际合作。这里我们简要介绍其中的两个项目。

1. 伊洛地区考古项目：

这个项目旨在调查中国王朝文明腹地的社会、经济和政治的长期变化，重点在伊洛河流域。这是一个多学科的研究项目，包括来自中国，澳大利亚，美国，英国和加拿大的许多专家。他们的专长包括全覆盖区域调查，地质考古学，地质学，植物考古学，动物考古学，土壤微观形态学和陶器分析。该项目由两个子项目组成：一是伊洛地区全覆盖调查，一是在偃师灰嘴遗址石器生产中心的发掘。我们的考古调查队与二里头考古队合作，共同覆盖了整个伊洛河流域（约850平方公里）。从裴李岗文化到东周时期（公元前6000-200年），共记录了410多个地点。聚落型态表明社会复杂化的进程是连续而波动的发展过程，表现为人口规模和聚落等级的变化。从龙山晚期到二里头文化出现了最重要的社会变迁，这时期人口不断增加，聚落等级由三级增加到四级，同时一个大型城市中心在二里头迅速建立。伊洛河流域的这些发展与周边地区人口下降的普遍趋势形成鲜明对比。

这一调查项目的结果揭示了公元前二千纪的重大社会变革，代表了中原地区早期国家的形成和城市化的进程。伊洛河流域的二里头大型中心聚落的形成和城市化的发生，在时间和空间上与古代文献记载的夏商王朝部分重合。这些发现有助于我们理解中国北方国家形成和早期朝代建立的社会政治变革，这是本书讨论的一个重要而有争议的课题。

2.食物考古：野生资源的利用和农业的起源

农业的起源是我们研究项目的另一个课题，这是因为农业为发展社会复杂性奠定了经济基础。我们建立了以石器微痕和残留物分析为重点的项目，以了解史前人类如何利用野生食物和驯化植物。与专家合作，我们分析了从更新世晚期（山西柿子滩），全新世早期（浙江上山和北京东胡林），到全新世中期（河南的莪沟和石固）多个遗址的磨盘磨棒，并揭示了古代人类在不同地区采用的多种食物获取策略。我们发现在晚更新世时期旧石器时代的人们不仅利用野生粟黍等谷物，而且还采集各种块茎和豆类，在全新世初始之际，气候变的暖湿，人们开始利用橡子为食物。早期新石器时代的人类继续使用许多野生植物，类似于他们的旧石器时代的前辈，虽然这时谷物驯化已经在进行。这些结果有助于我们理解中国史前时期两个重要的社会变化。首先，早在全新世开始之前，旧石器时代的人群已经采用了广谱生计策略，这与最初提出的广谱生计策略的概念相左。其次，新石器时代是一个非常漫长的过程，而不是查尔德最初描述的那样是一个革命性的事件。这些新的数据丰富了我们在书中撰写农业过渡章节时的知识。

这本书是为英语地区的学者和学生编写的，他们的专业不一定是中国考古学。因此，我们在书中努力描述一个关于中国古代社会的广阔的图景，并可以从比较的角度来观察。例如，中国古代文明不同于美索不达米亚，后者依赖对外贸易获取生业必需品，贵重物品则是经济的核心要素，也是政治体制形成的关键所在，而古代中国人主要依靠丰富的本地自然资源满足生业需求。但这种相对自给自足的区域经济方式，需要辅之以积极的长途交换才能获得奢侈品和稀有原料，在史前时期和早期历史时期都是如此。贸易活动与礼仪行为密切相关，而礼仪行为常使用某些类型的贵重物品，特别是玉器和青铜器。这些礼仪形态有助于中国文明形成期在大范围内形成共同的信仰体系、祭祀方式和象征性符号组合。

在本书中，我们阐述了中华文明形成的漫长，坎坷和复杂多样的历程。这个文明经历了环境剧变的挑战、复杂社会的兴衰、社会冲突和政治纷争、出乎意料的社会转形和外来影响。我们可能永远也无法确切知道“中国性”(Chineseness)到底是如何形成的，也难以彻底了解古代“中国性”的一切详情。而且，需要研究的问题永远会比答案多。我们希望，本书有助于打开一扇窗口，能够让我们更清晰地认识8000多年来社会进步的过程，在这个过程中，这片土地上的诸多小村落一步步转变为一个伟大的文明体系，我们称之为中国。

The book, The Archaeology of China: From the Late Paleolithic to the Early Bronze Age, published in 2012 by Cambridge University Press in the Cambridge World Archaeology Series, was a decade-long research project. The initial book proposal was submitted in 1997, then revised in 2003; the manuscript was completed and submitted to the press for review in 2010, followed by a one-year long revision; the final version of the manuscript was submitted and accepted in 2011.

The book covers a period of more than 20,000 years of Chinese prehistory and early history, focusing on several fundamental questions in human evolution: the origins of agriculture and sedentism, the origins of social inequality, and the origins of early states and cities. This was a very long and slow processes, involving evolutionary trajectories from the last Paleolithic hunting-gathering groups, through Neolithic farming villages, to the Bronze Age Shang dynasty. The book illustrates how ancient societies during this period transformed from simple to complex, tribal to urban, “uncivilized” to “civilized,” and preliterate to literate.

Thanks to rapidly advancing research and technology in China, the available information on archaeology is extremely rich. To write this book, we visited many sites and talked to numerous archaeologists who were active in fieldwork all over China. These communications greatly improved our knowledge about new discoveries in different regions. We made every effort to cover the most up-to-date archaeological data up to the time when the manuscript was completed (2011). A significant amount of the data and interpretations in this volume was derived from our own research projects conducted during the past 20 years, which involved international collaborations among many scholars and students. Here we briefly describe two of our projects, as follows.

1. The Yiluo Region Archaeology Project:

This project aimed to investigate the long-term social, economic, and political changes in the heartland of Chinese dynastic civilization, focusing on the Yiluo basin. It is a multi-disciplinary research project, involving many experts from China, Australia, the United States, England, and Canada. Their expertise includes full-coverage regional survey, geo-archaeology, geology, archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, soil micro-morphology, and ceramic analysis. The project consisted of two programs: the full-coverage survey of the Yiluo region and the excavation of a stone-tool production center at the Huizui site in Yanshi. Our survey team worked with the Erlitou Archaeology Team, together covering the entire Yiluo basin (about 850 km²). More than 410 sites were recorded, dating from the Peiligang culture to the Eastern Zhou period (ca. 6000-200 BC). The settlement patterns indicate a continuous but fluctuating development of social complexity, indicated by the changes in population size and settlement hierarchy. The most important social change appeared during a period from the Late Longshan to the Erlitou culture, characterized by growing population, increase of settlement hierarchy from three to four tiers, and an urban center rapidly established at Erlitou. These developments in the Yiluo basin are in a sharp contrast to the surrounding regions, where population decline was a common phenomenon.

The results from this survey program revealed a significant social transformation during the second millennium BC, representing the process of early state formation and urbanization in the Central Plain. The occurrence of settlement nucleation and urbanization in the Yiluo basin   partially coincided, in time and space, with the Xia and Shang dynasties recorded in the ancient texts. These findings greatly contributed to our understanding of sociopolitical change relating to state formation and early dynasties in north China, which was an important but controversial topic discussed in the book.

2. Archaeology of food: the exploitation of the wild resources and the origins of agriculture

The origins of food production was another topic in our research projects, as agriculture helped build an economic foundation for the development of social complexity. We developed projects focusing on use-wear and microbotanical analyses of stone tools, in order to understand how prehistorical people exploited wild foods and domesticated plants. Working with specialists, we analyzed grinding stones from sites ranging from the late Pleistocene (Shizitan in Shanxi), early Holocene (Shangshan in Zhejiang and Donghulin in Beijing), and middle Holocene (Egou and Shigu in Henan), and revealed diverse strategies of food exploitation in different regions through time. We found that Paleolithic people exploited not only wild cereals, such as wild millet, but also collected various tubers and beans during the late Pleistocene, then began to add acorn into their diet at the onset of the Holocene when the climate became warmer and wetter. The early Neolithic people continued to use many wild plants, similar to their Paleolithic predecessors, although cereal domestication was already underway. These results help us to understand two important social changes in Chinese prehistory. First, Paleolithic populations had already adopted broad-spectrum subsistence strategies long before the beginning of the Holocene, as was first proposed in the original concept. Second, Neolithization was a very long process rather than a revolutionary event, as V. Gordon Childe originally described. These new data enriched our knowledge when writing the chapters on transition to agriculture in the book.

This book was written for scholars and students in English speaking regions, who are not necessarily specialized in Chinese archaeology. Therefore, we intended to present a broad picture about ancient China, which can be viewed from a comparative perspective. For example, unlike the Mesopotamian civilization, in which external trade for obtaining both subsistence necessities and prestige goods was essential for its economy as well as for the formation of its political systems, ancient people in China largely relied on rich local resources for subsistence needs. Such relatively self-sufficient regional economic modes, nevertheless, were accompanied by active, long-distance exchange of luxuries and scarce raw materials, during prehistory as well as in early historical times. These activities were closely related to ritual practices involving certain types of prestige items, particularly those made of jade and bronze. Such ceremonial patterns would have helped to shape common belief systems, ritual behaviors, and symbolic assemblages over a broad region during the formative period of Chinese civilization.

Throughout the book, we illustrated the long, bumpy, and multidirectional pathways to Chinese civilization. This civilization has experienced great environmental challenges, episodic rise and fall of complex societies, social conflict and political controversy, unintended social transformations, and foreign influences. We may never be able to demonstrate how “Chineseness” was formed or to fully understand what “Chineseness” was in ancient times. In addition, there are always more research questions than answers. We hope that this book may help to open a window that allows us to see more clearly the long social progress of more than 8,000 years, during which small villages were transformed into a great civilization in the land that we call China today.

Biographic Sketches

Li Liu received a BA degree in archaeology from the Department of History at Northwestern University, Xi’an, in 1982, and worked in Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archeology from 1982 to 1983. She received an MA degree in Anthropology at Temple University in 1987 and a PhD degree in Anthropology at Harvard University in 1994, both in the USA. She then taught in the Department of Archaeology at La Trobe University in Australia from 1996 to 2010, and was elected as Fellow of the Academy of Humanities in Australia in 2008. Since 2010, she has been a professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford University in the USA. Her research mainly focuses on archeology of early China, cultural interaction between China and other parts of the Old World, domestication of animals and plants, early state formation and social complexity, settlement archeology and early urbanization. In recent years, she has been working on microbotanical and use-wear analyses on stone tools and pottery. She currently leads the archeology team at Stanford University to study the origins and development of alcoholic production and consumption in prehistoric China. She has published three monographs (two are co-authored with Xingcan Chen): State Formation in Early China. London: Duckworth, 2003 (translated into Korean in 2006); The Chinese Neolithic: Trajectories to Early States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004 (translated into Chinese in 2007); The Archaeology of China: From the Late Paleolithic to the Early Bronze Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012 (translated into Chinese in 2017). The last book is so far, the most comprehensive English book on Chinese archeology. She has also published more than 100 book chapters and journal articles, including 65 in English, French, and Spanish, and 36 in Chinese. These articles, many of which are co-authored with other specialists, covered a wide range of topics.

Xingcan Chen is Senior Fellow and Director of the Institute of Archaeology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and also Chair and Professor in the Department of Archaeology at CASS’s Graduate School, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), Beijing, China. He has been working in the middle Yellow River Valley in China for more than 25 years and excavated Lilou, Beiyangping, Xipo and Huizui sites. His main interests include the rise of agriculture, state formation, history of archaeology, theory and method of archaeology and ethnoarchaeology. He has published numerous articles, books and monographs. Among his various publications are The History of Chinese Prehistoric Archaeology (1895-1949) (in Chinese, 1997, in Korean, 2011), Essays on Archaeology (in Chinese, 2002), State Formation in Early China (co-authored with Li Liu, 2003; in Korean, 2006), China Before China (co-authored with Magnus Fiskesjö, 2004), Papers on the History of Chinese Archaeology (in Chinese, 2009), Essays on Archaeology II (in Chinese, 2010) and The Archaeology of China: From the Late Paleolithic to the Early Bronze Age (co-authored with Li Liu, 2012; in Chinese, 2017).