The conquest of the Shang Dynasty at Anyang around 1046 BCE by the Zhou is one of the major events for not only Chinese Bronze Age but also early interaction between the pastoralist groups from the Eurasian Steppes and agriculture ones in the Central Plains of China. It is well-known from historical texts that the pre-Zhou people lived in the ancient Bin region (豳), the exact location of which is unclear, but most likely in the Jing River valley. At some point the leader Gugong Danfu (古公亶父) moved from Bin to the capital Qi (Zhouyuan), which preceded the Zhou invasion of Anyang. We have produced a new high resolution radiocarbon chronology for Zaolinhetan, a small settlement in the pre-Zhou heartland. This shows not only an exceptionally long chronological span for the site, but also a different phasing compared to the traditional pottery typology, which raises new questions regarding the regional variation of pottery typologies. Intriguingly, the analysis also reveals a rapid abandonment of Zaolinhetan around 1100 BCE, at the same time many larger sites, such as Zhouyuan, which later became the capital of the Western Zhou dynasty, were significantly expanding. We argue that the drastic decline of Zaolinhetan as revealed by the substantial number of radiocarbon dates and probably also the movement of pre-Zhou political center from Bin to Qin, was part of bigger picture that involved a range of social and environmental factors.

The Xia-Shang Zhou Chronology Project was a five-year state-sponsored project, carried out between 1995–2000, to determine an absolute chronology of the Western Zhou dynasty and approximate chronologies of the Xia and Shang dynasties. At the end of the five years, the Project issued a provisional report entitled Report on the 1996–2000 Provisional Results of the Xia-Shang Zhou Chronology Project: Brief Edition detailing its results. A promised full report was finally published in 2022: Report on the Xia-Shang Zhou Chronology Project. Although numerous discoveries in the more than twenty years between the publications of the Brief Edition and the Report have revealed that the Project's absolute chronology of the Western Zhou is fundamentally flawed, and some of the problems are acknowledged by the Report, still the Report maintains the Project's chronology without any correction. In the review, I present four of these discoveries, from four different periods of the Western Zhou, discussing their implications for the Project's chronology. I conclude with a call for some sort of authoritative statement acknowledging the errors in the report.

During the early first millennium BC, having deposed the Shang dynasty, the Western Zhou exerted power over large parts of China. Archaeologically, however, the Western Zhou are less well known than their predecessors in terms of north-west China. The site of Yaoheyuan is one of the most important recent discoveries of the Western Zhou period in north-west China. Investigations have revealed a walled urban centre, with high-status cemeteries and sacrificial pits, a palace complex, a bronze-casting foundry, pottery workshops and inscribed oracle bones. These unparalleled finds provide significant new evidence with which to examine the political and cultural landscape of north-west China and, more broadly, to reassess the relationships between centres and peripheries during the Chinese late Bronze Age.

This article explores how the memory of the conquest of Shang and the rise of the first Zhou kings was transmitted during the early centuries of the Zhou dynasty, specifically as it was reflected in inscriptions on excavated bronze vessels and bells from the Western Zhou period (ca. mid-eleventh to early eighth century b.c.e.). Approaching these inscribed objects and their texts from the perspective of the theories of social memory and cultural memory reveals that commemorating the foundational past of the dynasty became part of an intentional policy of the Zhou royal house as early as the first half of the tenth century b.c.e. It demonstrates that by the mid-tenth century b.c.e., a stable narrative emphasizing Kings Wen 文 and Wu 武 as the founding fathers of the Zhou dynasty was established at the expense of King Cheng 成, whose role was gradually downplayed following the general logic of lineage organization, according to which the commemoration of the earliest common ancestors serves as the foundation of corporate integrity in a network of patrilineally related families. It shows that most of the men who included such commemorations in inscriptions indeed belonged to the royal patrilineal network, wherein they occupied the highest positions. It further exemplifies that the royal house cultivated the memory of the first kings using various media, including rituals, utensils, royal speeches, and inscriptions. From the analysis of such inscriptions, we can infer that that the foundational memory of the Zhou dynasty was usually reactivated in the context of political negotiations, some of which included addressing lineage outsiders. Finally, it shows that both the royal house and other metropolitan lineages modified the foundational narrative according to their current needs. This article thus contributes both to tracing the roots of the early Chinese historiographic tradition and to understanding memory production in a society as an ongoing process of negotiations and adaptations.

Zhang Changshou was one of the most important archaeologists of modern China, and a founder of Western Zhou archaeology. Zhang is particularly well known as the author of a series of works that established the chronology of the Western Zhou material culture and is esteemed for his excellent scholarship also on bronzes and jade objects, characterized by a strong basis in field archaeology. Among his academic appointments are Director of the Feng-Hao Archaeological Team in 1963–1988, and Associate Director of the Institute of Archaeology (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) in 1985–1988. Zhang was also a pioneer of Sino-American collaboration (with Harvard University) in field archaeology and was elected a Corresponding Member of the German Archaeological Institute in 1988. Zhang passed away in Beijing on January 30, 2020. This article summarizes his academic accomplishments.

Academic interest in the elaborate bead assemblages recovered from graves of the Western Zhou elite has grown in recent years. Beads and beaded ornaments have been seen as both markers of external contact and evidence of change in the Zhou ritual system. Recent study of these bead assemblages, however, indicates that they may also have reflected shifting political circumstances. The use of different bead materials and forms suggests a trend to centralised production and control of manufacture, particularly from the later tenth century BC. The authors correlate a move towards readily manufactured materials with evidence for widespread elite intermarriage, and consider a possible tension between production and the socio-political strategies of the Zhou court.

The relations between the emergent Yan state, local groups and the power blocks of the Shang and Zhou are vividly chronicled by bronze vessels, weapons and burials rites in Bronze Age northern China.