The Guandimiao Bone Assemblage (and What it Says about the Shang Economy)

Abstract

The Anyang period village of Guandimiao—the only nearly completely excavated village in China of its time—is crucially important for understanding nonurban, nonelites in North China at the end of the second millennium b.c.e. Guandimiao was a small village that specialized in ceramic production, which indicates a hitherto unsuspected degree of economic specialization and integration in the Shang countryside. One line of evidence supporting an argument for economic integration between the urban center at Anyang and the countryside comes from the bone artifact assemblage recovered from the site. The Guandimiao bone artifact assemblage can be divided into four groups, each revealing a different path of production and distribution. One of these paths of production and distribution leads from this tiny village to Great Settlement Shang and its huge bone workshops some 200 km away.