This list of books are ONLY the books that have been ranked on the lists that are aggregated on this site. This is not a comprehensive list of all books by this author.

1. 1. The Ancestral Landscape

   Time, Space, and Community in Late Shang China (ca. 1200–1045 B.C.)

   

   Drawing on oracle-bone inscriptions and archaeological evidence, this study reconstructs the Late Shang worldview, showing how divination, sacrificial rites, and ancestral kinship structured royal authority and everyday governance. It examines conceptions of time through ritual calendars and cyclical reckonings, and of space through the orientation of capitals, altars, and fields that linked the living to the dead. The portrait is of a community bound by lineage obligations and mediated by a king who negotiated with powerful ancestors and Di to secure order, harvests, and victory. The result is a clear synthesis of how religious practice, political power, and material culture converged to shape early Chinese civilization.

2. 2. The Origins Of Chinese Civilization

   

   An interdisciplinary synthesis of archaeological and textual evidence traces the rise of complex society in North China from Neolithic cultures to the early Bronze Age, examining settlement patterns, craft specialization and bronze metallurgy, ritual and ancestor worship, divination and the origins of writing, kinship and political organization, and regional interactions. It highlights how material culture, ideology, and social structures co-evolved to produce the Shang state while emphasizing regional diversity, long-term continuities, and the methodological challenges of reconstructing early Chinese history.

   Purchase from Bookshop.org