'Professor Li's monograph is a direct and canny intervention in the central debate in the archaeology of pre-imperial China, that is, the debate over the relationship between canonical literary-historical accounts of early polities and archaeological evidence for the extent and nature of these polities. The brilliance of Professor Li's approach is that it situates the emergence of accounts of the past (including those literary-historical accounts) in a richly detailed presentation of cultural exchange, urban development and decline, and population movement in the millennia before the emergence of writing … the book will be greeted as a major achievement, both for its confident control of the sources and for its rigorous theoretical approach to the problem of cultural memory-formation.' David Schaberg, University of California, Los Angeles
Foreword; 1. Wen Ding: gaging the weight of political power; 2. Frames of reference: multiple classifications of space; 3. Before the Central Plains: the pinnacle of Neolithic development; 4. The Longshan transition: political experimentation and expanding horizons; 5. The rise of the Luoyang Basin and the production of the first bronze Ding vessels; 6. The rise of the Henei Basin and the limit of Shang hegemony; 7. The rise of the Guanzhong Basin and the birth of history; 8. The world of Yu's tracks: a blueprint for political experimentation; 9. Conclusion: the emergence of the classical tradition; Bibliography; Index.