The Shang Zhou Transition

At the end of the second millennium BC, the Late Shang state (ca. 1250-1046 BC) was one of the most powerful polities in the ancient world, exerting substantial influence throughout early China from their capital at Anyang (Yinxu). Through the transition from the Late Shang to the Western Zhou, the political landscape experienced a deep rupture and a profound realignment through the turn of the first millennium BC. This significant shift from the Shang state at Anyang to the Zhou (ca. 1046-221 BC) centered in the Guanzhong and Luoyang Basins held immense implications for trajectories of social change in early China. Systematic investigations into the Shang-Zhou transition remain limited in anthropological archaeology. The nature of the impact of this transition on communities caught within a collapsing Shang state and an expanding Zhou state, moreover, is poorly understood.Through the development and application of an archaeology of immanence, the objective of this dissertation is to map the constellations of power that were integral to the processes underlying the Shang-Zhou transition. I engage in a wide-ranging archaeological synthesis of published materials on the social, political, and economic dynamics of early China supplemented by pottery analyses of utilitarian pottery vessels. I argue that the transition is an ongoing accumulation of interrelated events and encounters emerging throughout early China during the late second and early first millennia BC. In elucidating sociopolitical dynamics in the Shang and Zhou periods, I put forward the concept of an affective state. In this model, a state is a political form always in process, incessantly changing and, critically, a historically contingent form that is beholden to the myriad of human and non-human beings that occupy the landscape, their becomings, and their embodied potentialities. I also contend that the complex, overlapping social and economic networks interwoven in what would become the Zhou ancestral landscape provided fertile grounds for the rise of the Western Zhou state. Through a framework focusing on trauma, I also demonstrate how the rise of the Western Zhou society was contingent on the becomings of the Shang people in the wake of conquest.