Excavating the Afterlife: The Archaeology of Early Chinese Religion

by Guolong Lai

Overview

In Excavating the Afterlife, Guolong Lai explores the dialectical relationship between sociopolitical change and mortuary religion from an archaeological perspective. By examining burial structure, grave goods, and religious documents unearthed from groups of well-preserved tombs in southern China, Lai shows that new attitudes toward the dead, resulting from the trauma of violent political struggle and warfare, permanently altered the early Chinese conceptions of this world and the afterlife. The book grounds the important changes in religious beliefs and ritual practices firmly in the sociopolitical transition from the Warring States (ca. 453–221 BCE) to the early empires (3rd century–1st century BCE).

A methodologically sophisticated synthesis of archaeological, art historical, and textual sources, Excavating the Afterlife will be of interest to art historians, archaeologists, and textual scholars of China, as well as to students of comparative religions.

Art History Publication Initiative. For more information, visit http://arthistorypi.org/books/excavating-the-afterlife

Honorable Mention for the 2016 Society for American Archaeology Book Award in the Scholarly Category

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295805702
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	03/02/2015
Series:	Art History Publication Initiative Books
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	155 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Guolong Lai is associate professor of Chinese art and archaeology at the University of Florida and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Chronology of Early Chinese Dynasties

Introduction

1. The Dead Who Would Not Be Ancestors

2. The Transformation of Burial Space

3. The Presence of the Invisible

4. Letters to the Underworld

5. Journey to the Northwest

Conclusion

Notes

Glossary of Chinese Characters

Bibliography

Index

What People are Saying About This

Anthony Barbieri-Low

Lai rightly prioritizes the archaeological remains over the textual tradition to uncover how people in the territory of Chu actually treated the dead and how they viewed the spirits, uncovering new insights into early Chinese religion. This is an invaluable contribution to the field.

Amy McNair

Lai’s explanation of the shift in attitude toward the dead—from a neutral notion of the ancestral spirits to fear of the spirits as unmoored and malevolent entities who need to be guided—is very provocative.

From the Publisher

"Lai rightly prioritizes the archaeological remains over the textual tradition to uncover how people in the territory of Chu actually treated the dead and how they viewed the spirits, uncovering new insights into early Chinese religion. This is an invaluable contribution to the field."—Anthony Barbieri-Low, author of Artisans in Early Imperial China

"Lai's explanation of the shift in attitude toward the dead—from a neutral notion of the ancestral spirits to fear of the spirits as unmoored and malevolent entities who need to be guided—is very provocative."—Amy McNair, author of Upright Brush: Yan Zhenqing's Calligraphy and Song Literati Politics

Interviews

During the last four decades, a large number of ancient tombs were excavated in South China, which yielded exquisite examples of early Chinese art such as bronze ritual vessels, jade ornaments, ceramic figurines, wooden sculptures, lacquer wares, as well as bamboo slips and silk manuscripts and paintings. Why were these objects buried in tombs? What roles did they play in life as well as in the afterlife? How did the burial rites and the construction of postmortem environment manifest people's religious concerns? What was the impact of the social, intellectual, and political development on religious practice in early China? These are the questions that I try to answer in Digging up Chu Mortuary Religion: Death and Burial in Early China.This book represents the first synthetic account of early Chinese religion from an archaeological perspective. Combining historical, archaeological, art historical, and epigraphic analysis, I explore a critical moment in the development of Chinese mortuary religion during the transition from the Warring States period (ca. 453-221 BCE) to the early imperial era (3rd century BCE to 1st century CE).The "Chu" in the title refers to the state of Chu (ca. 800-223 BCE) and its cultural sphere under Qin (221-206 BCE) and early Han (206 BCE-9 CE) empires. This cultural sphere in South China is one of the few areas that have the best natural conditions for archaeological preservation. In addition, with its rich artistic and literary legacy (The Songs of the South, for example), Chu often arouse people's imagination and was considered "the road not taken," an unrealized alternative to the social and political reality, since it was the last state that vehemently competed with Qin in the unification of China and lost tragically.This book is concerned with tombs, not only as sites where the remains were disposed, but also as the space that contained people's imagination of the cosmos and the life hereafter. Understanding "religion" as a social system of communication, I first explore divinatory and sacrificial records recovered from Chu tombs to disclose curious, but long overlooked, changes in the religious pantheon and attitudes towards the dead in the Warring States Period. This emergence of a "personalized death" had ramifications for the way the Chinese buried and communicated the dead: how they buried the dead, where they buried the dead, what objects they buried with the dead, and what the burial ideology we can deduce from these practices.The archaeology of religion represents growing fields that have fascinated generations of students and scholars. I thus envision multiple audiences not only for scholars and students in the fields of Chinese history, Chinese religion, comparative religion, art history, archaeology, and anthropology, but also but also those outside of the immediate field of Chinese studies, who are interested in comparative studies of religion and the human responses to death.This book contributes to a better understanding of the development of artistic, religious, and literary traditions in early China. Funerary customs and their underlying ideologies have had a great impact on the long artistic tradition of China. The abundance of textual data and the increasing amount of archaeological materials enable us to examine the process of religious and intellectual developments in detail, which can also illuminate similar developments in other civilizations.

Editorial Reviews

"Lai highlights the richness and complexity of the region’s archaeological record while demonstrating the nuance that well-considered material culture can add to knowledge of early religion."

Choice

"[I]mmensely interesting. . . Excavating the Afterlife should be of interest to Sinologists and researchers of Chinese studies, archaeologists and art historians, scholars and students of comparative religions."

Monumenta Serica - Zbigniew Wesolowski

"This book provides a very nuanced, detailed, and vivid account of the ‘mortuary religion’ of southern China from the Warring States to the Han period. . . . A very valuable resource for future studies in this field. . . . The bold but always well-founded stance that Lai takes on these topics combined with the richness of source material and exemplary nature of this approach make this volume a true milestone in the study of early religion in southern China."

Journal of Chinese Religions - Anke Hein

"Lai offers his reader an extraordinary wealth of both facts and interpretations"

Arts Asiatiques - John Lagerwey