The Archaeology of Han China (hereinafter referred to as Han Archaeology) fills a significant gap in the existing English-language works on the Han Empire.Footnote ¹ Not only does the book provide an up-to-date synthesis of new archaeological finds and recent scholarship on Han China, but the volume also distinguishes itself by employing a network framework of empire and taking a ground-up approach, focusing on archaeological and material cultural evidence. It refreshingly frames Han empire-building as a project of managing heterogeneous spaces, peoples, material practices, and processes of identity formation in its first two centuries (third century BCE–first century BCE).

Han Archaeology exemplifies an integrative approach and multi-scalar analysis in the archaeological study of the past. It also engages with two prevailing conceptions of the Han. One is that the Han consolidated a political and cultural unity by building upon Qin’s epoch-setting but short-lived imperial rule in the last decades of the third century BCE: a view that imperial-era official historians and many Chinese nationalists since the early twentieth century share. The other is a deconstructionist critique of such unity in current scholarship. The critics view these achievements of the Han as partial, rhetorical, or moralizing in nature. Han Archaeology positions itself between the received and revived legacies of Han consolidation that emphasize the greater political and cultural unity of China, and the question of whether the Han was a “fictive or real empire” (4). It takes a substantive approach to engage with and go beyond these historiographical debates. As “first and foremost an archaeological history” (15), Han Archaeology delves into the historical processes, institutions, and material practices of building, producing, crafting, and making the imperial state, the body politic, and value regimes in Han China. It focuses on the historical questions that spatial and material analysis are best suited to address, while incorporating textual and visual sources when necessary.

Han Archaeology’s conceptual focus and methodological priorities are presented in the four thematic sections: imperial geography, food production and foodways, crafts, and death rituals. Each section has two chapters, covering the imperial core and the frontiers respectively. Organizing Han history around geography breaks away from the traditional model of dynastic history, organized by the reigns of emperors, and from event-centered narrative history. Han Archaeology deliberately separates the Han heartland in the Yellow River Valley from the imperial frontiers in the north (Hexi and Ordos) and in the south (Lingnan) for three reasons. First, this structure supports the book’s main argument that the first two centuries of Han empire-building focused on effectively managing the enlarged imperial geography, especially at the frontiers: borderlands that posed varied degrees of military, administrative, and cultural challenges compared to regions that the Qin had already integrated. Second and relatedly, the authors argue that the core–periphery model—despite being increasingly critiqued— “bears some resemblance to the ‘emic’ spatial categories employed by Han administrators” (15). Lastly, although the authors do not explicitly state the point, their expertise and longstanding fieldwork in the Yellow River Valley and Lingnan certainly strengthen their data analysis and historical interpretations. The four-part, two-chapter core–periphery structure works well. It demonstrates the strength of a region-based approach without reifying a core–periphery hierarchy; it enables the authors to organize the large volume of archaeological data; and it emphasizes the role geography played in Han empire-building.

Han Archaeology sets the scene with the imperial geography. Chapter 1, “Imperial Geography of the Capital and Core Macro-regions,” covers the capital, Chang’an, in the Wei River valley; the Guandong region to the east; and the Middle Yangzi region to the south. This chapter clearly demonstrates the strength of the book’s archaeological and ground-up approach, through its examination of the logistical and infrastructural functions of Chang’an as a dynamic and growing urban center that created “new conditions of urban life in the capital” (33). The chapter makes two key points. The first is that Han Chang’an was not “rebuilt largely from scratch” (34). Instead, Han transformed the physical space of the imperial capital that had been inherited from the Qin. Reexamination of the physical construction—the roads, city walls, gates, and markets—in the capital site evinces pragmatic continuity and accommodation, as well as the repurposing of existing structures from the Qin era. Second, the Han innovation in managing capital space lay in transforming the “urban-rural continuum” into “a metropolitan area” with “enhanced mobility and shared infrastructure” to facilitate greater movement of goods and people between the rural and the urban areas (37). Recent archaeological surveys of networks of man-made channels and reservoirs in and around Han Chang’an reveal how water management was crucial to the growing population and their expanding activities in an emerging metropolis. The two points together support the authors’ characterization of Chang’an as “transformative” rather than “exemplary,” and make a convincing case for moving away from the classical portrayal of the imperial capital as a static center of the empire or a cosmological pivot of the world.

A similarly grounded approach is used to examine how spaces were managed in the Guandong region. On the eastern plains, settlement archaeology has begun to reveal what traditional historiography has neglected or been unable to capture: the complex relationship between “independent kingdoms” and “imperial integration” (43). Rather than imposing the imperial will or relying solely on military force, Han strategies for the eastern part of the empire were as multifaceted as the approach to remaking the capital. They focused on the long-term management of various spaces, not only political space. On the ground, there was “a tenuous juxtaposition of both multicentered and unified administrative system (yitong)” (43), which traditional histories often oversimplified to portray a unidirectional process of centralization by the Han imperial court. Chapter 1 concludes with the Middle Yangzi Valley. Recent scholarship, primarily based on newly excavated Qin and Han administrative and legal documents in the region, has highlighted a long-term and continuous effort by the northern Qin and Han regimes to integrate this region. Compared to the more comprehensive reexamination of Chang’an and its surrounding areas, the treatment of the Middle Yangzi region is brief and at times disjointed, perhaps because it is challenging to fully integrate the varied evidence—settlements, excavated documents, and artifacts such as the entombed Mawangdui maps whose nature is still debated among scholars. Still, it is insightful to characterize the Qin–Han efforts in the region as “spatial reworking” (51), which was explicitly designed to disrupt the established socio-political structure of the former Chu Kingdom and to develop local strategies that focused on the river networks.

Chapter 2, “Imperial Geography and Border Formation in the Ordos and Lingnan Regions,” shifts to the two ecologically contrasting borderland regions. Here, too, settlement archaeology, along with excavated documents, has shed light on the diachronic processes of frontier-making, settler colonization, and Han imperial expansion. Echoing works that theorize borderlands as a “protected network rather than a directly occupied and enclosed territory,” this chapter raises questions about both the mechanisms of control and the formation of “border consciousness.” The Central Plain-based Han regime faced ecological challenges in the arid steppes of the north and the malarial tropics in the Far South. Traditional historical accounts of Han frontier policies and conventional historical scholarship relying on them often attribute the perceived policy flexibility to political pragmatism and administrative expediency. This chapter complicates the issue by making a case for Han’s space-based strategies and spatialized identity-making at the frontiers.

For the Lingnan region, the authors note that the Han conquest of the Nanyue Kingdom in 111 BCE and its subsequent administrative incorporation of the Far South did not result in strict territorial consolidation. The archaeology of Panyu (the Nanyue capital located near modern-day Guangzhou in the Pearl River Delta) and the fortified settlements in the uplands of the Nanling Range have revealed Nanyue’s ambitions and activities in expanding maritime trade networks and gaining access to overland trade routes (71). This helps to explain both why Nanyue built its capital in what northerners saw as a “turgid and disease-ridden environment,” and why the Han built upon Nanyue’s networks, in fact intensifying the construction of coastal nodes. The Han strategies for the Lingnan region involved economic expansion into what historians now refer to as the “Southeast Asian Maritime Zone” (74), demonstrating a clear recognition of the southern frontier’s unique maritime geography in the expansion of imperial trade networks. At the northern frontier, recent archaeological data indicate that the Han expansion of settlements “followed a distinct territorial structure, adapted to secure control of resources over a vast but patchy geography” (78). Therefore, the authors support the established view that both Qin’s and Han’s northern frontier strategies were rooted in agrarian expansion. In these two cases of frontier making from the perspective of managing provisional imperial space, Han Archaeology insightfully suggests that historical inquiry should focus on how the state “enfranchised imperial subjects to create and produce political, cultural, and economic boundaries from within” (85). This insight paves the way for the next two sections as concrete examples of Han imperial management “from within,” namely, food production and crafts.

Part II, “Food Production and Foodways,” encompasses “Crop Production in the Guanzhong Basin” (Chapter 3) and “Crop Production in the Yellow River Valley and the New Territories” (Chapter 4). Although Han agricultural development and its historical role in the Han economy have been subjects of past scholarship, Han Archaeology emphasizes the Han state’s infrastructural and technological investments, arguing that the Han state developed an ecological-administrative approach rooted in the spatial logics of managing the empire’s heterogeneous territories. Importantly, the Han managed not only human labor but also animals, plants, and soil through an increasingly sophisticated bureaucracy that excelled in record-keeping and tax extraction.

Chapter 3 examines the imperial core. Besides providing a detailed overview of the Han centralizing and bureaucratic system, this chapter uses the example of constructing the ward system in Chang’an to demonstrate how local administrative officials were tasked with managing the daily lives of the people through land use, crop cultivation, and taxation, thereby fulfilling the state’s needs. Going beyond the capital itself, this chapter also discusses agricultural development in the surrounding areas of Chang’an—the Guanzhong region—focusing on how staple crops such as millet, rice, soybeans, sorghum, and, increasingly, wheat sustained the growing population of the metropolitan capital. The archaeobotanical analysis of staple grains, as well as the irrigation, canal transportation, and granary storage in the Guanzhong region, corroborates records in transmitted textual sources, providing grounded evidence of food production and foodways that well support the “urban-rural continuum” argument made in Chapter 1. The final section of the chapter is devoted to technological innovations and changes in agricultural production, including crop rotation, the ridge-and-furrow method, ox-drawn plowing, iron tools, and the regular use of manure as fertilizer. Overall, this chapter makes a compelling argument that Han agricultural development should be viewed as part of state activism in transforming not only the physical landscape but also the ecosystem of foodways (118).

Chapter 4 builds on this argument by examining the political implications of food production and foodways in two other regions of the Han Empire through the theoretical lenses of “ecological imperialism” and “discrepant experience” (123). In the middle of the Yellow River Valley, the excavation of Sanyangzhuang in present-day Henan province exemplifies the Han state’s organizational management at the local level. However, the debated nature of Sanyangzhuang and the absence of a detailed study of village life at the site make any conclusion premature. The southern frontiers, on the other hand, provide a comprehensive picture of both the motivation and consequences of the Han state’s “civilizing” practices, as reflected in a variety of sources—standard histories, excavated texts, settlement archaeology, and buried food remains. To spread intensive agricultural practices developed in the core regions and increase population migration in search of more arable land and opportunities for maritime trade, the Han state’s southward expansion was primarily for economic reasons. At the northern frontiers, the state employed a cost-effective system of military-farming garrisons and colonies (tuntian 屯田), against the backdrop of the militarization of the frontier and agricultural expansion in the borderlands, as discussed in Chapter 2. Looking at these two frontier regions together, Han Archaeology demonstrates that the Han state “was able to substantially transform the landscape and the composition of communities” (145) in the targeted frontier regions through different management strategies—localized administration in the south and military colonies in the north and northwest. What stands out is the book’s emphasis on how keen Han was to integrate the frontier and core regions into “a large food transportation system” (148). Such active transformation of foodways is an often-neglected aspect of the Han imperial project.

Crafts production (Part III) opens another underutilized venue for examining Han state activism and the imperial transformation in building regional and interregional networks of crafts circulation. Not only was craft production integrated into Han state finances, but also the Han state was a manufacturing powerhouse, particularly in comparison to its contemporaries, such as the Roman Empire. That being so, Han Archaeology also argues that the Han state attempted to manage craft production to structure the values of both critical commodities and everyday objects (“regimes of value,” 156). Following the same core–periphery structure, Chapter 5 focuses on “Craft Production and Consumption in the Capital and Yellow River Macro-Regions,” and Chapter 6 treats “Craft Production and Consumption in the Hexi and Lingnan Regions.” However, each chapter also presents a different argument. For the capital and its adjacent regions in the Yellow River Valley, the chapter employs a chaîne opératoire approach to craft production, using iron manufacturing as an example. It traces the operational chain from the procurement of raw materials to the transportation and consumption of final products to paint a holistic picture of how the Han state’s active management transformed the system of iron production and its commercialization. This chapter emphatically notes the archaeological discoveries of production sites, especially small-scale workshops, in the capital-adjoining regions, as well as the state-owned craft production of daily goods, such as iron tools and ceramics, in other regional centers throughout the empire. These production sites are especially significant because they provide material evidence for the complex and networked Han economy of how people acquired everyday goods. This chapter effectively complicates the conventional image of the imperial capital as the sole economic center and pinnacle of the economic hierarchy, while simultaneously reasserting the indispensable role that crafts and commerce played in Han imperial efforts to “transform unity” (182).

Chapter 6 challenges another long-standing explanation of changes in material culture at the imperial periphery as resulting from “Sinification” (jiaohua 教化) and the “assimilation” of local communities. Instead, this chapter examines the multifaceted and craft-specific processes that underpinned both craft production and the presence of industrially produced commodities in these distant areas. For example, the authors observe in the archaeological record the decline of earlier centers of textiles and lacquerware in the Warring States Chu regions (present-day Hubei and Hunan) during Western Han times, while the Sichuan Basin, particularly Chengdu, emerged as an unambiguous regional production center, as evinced by both tomb finds and production inscriptions. They attribute Chengdu’s rise as an intermediate center for imperially operated workshops of textiles and lacquerware to the Han state’s deliberate rebalancing of the craft production geography, echoing the “spatial reworking” argument in Chapter 1. For the highly centralized and increasingly tightly controlled metalwork industry, the authors argue that the bronze and iron mirrors present on the southern and northwestern frontiers are more likely to have been distributed through the imperial transportation networks. However, they see in the daily ceramics and porcelains in Lingnan a coexistence of state-controlled production and local craft traditions. These craft-specific and layered analyses effectively demonstrate complexities that models of “Sinification” and “assimilation” fail to capture.

Having examined the geopolitical and economic foundation of Han empire-building, Han Archaeology concludes with the question of identity formation. Utilizing the extensive mortuary findings of the past few decades, Part IV builds upon recent scholarship on how Han funerary material assemblages actively mediate, rather than strictly represent, individual identities, thereby facilitating the continuous construction of sociopolitical networks in the afterlife. People across various social strata, from the high nobility to the lower elite, and across imperial geographies, from core regions to frontiers, widely engaged with ideas and funerary practices related to death and the afterlife. This wide interest prompted the Han state to intervene through ritual discussions and legal regulations, a form of state activism. Han Archaeology argues that the Han state ultimately intended to direct the imperial populace toward a “Huaxia” (華夏) identity (218), a less tangible but no less integral aspect of the Han imperial project. In Chapter 7, “The (Un)dead and the Role of Ritual in the Crafting of Sociopolitical Networks,” the authors survey selected Han burial finds, which range from the royal mausoleums, princely rock-cut tombs, and lavish graves of the Han nobles to modest tombs of lower elite and local officials who nevertheless had written documents buried with them. They present both the physical construction of the burials and the material assemblages, connecting them to performative funerary rites, ritual economy, and identity mediation. Chapter 8, “Mourning Practices and the Cultivation of Selves–Views from the Hexi, Ordos, and Lingnan,” shifts to how the peoples at the frontiers—the Other in the eyes of their Han administrators—buried their dead, at times complicating and contradicting the Sinification or assimilation discourses in the Chinese written sources. The analytical lens of state activism proves fruitful in organizing the voluminous and discrete mortuary data, and the prism of identity also paves the way for returning in the conclusion to the question of Han-ness and ethnicity “raised by thorny translations of Zhongguo and Huaxia” (282).

Recognizing the role that concepts such as “Zhongguo” (中國) and “Huaxia” have played in Han historiography, in the Conclusion, Han Archaeology reaffirms its substantive approach toward group identity consciousness and formation. It does so without “eschewing the notion [of ethnicity] altogether” but by “taking on Chineseness as ‘an anachronism with a history’” (283). This substantive approach enables the book to investigate how the Han state concretely constructed and managed the empire on the ground: spatially (imperial geography), materially (foodways and craft production), and ideologically (ideas about death and the afterlife). The authors argue that “Huaxia emerged as a kind of self-understanding forged in people’s everyday lives” (283). The expansion of the commandery–county–ward imperial administrative system, mass population migration, and the development of a commodified economy all contributed to individuals’ emerging self-identification as subjects of the Han state with “ranks and roles” (283). The territorial changes, and more importantly, the Han state’s spatial–social engineering at the frontiers in the north, along the walls, and south of the Yangzi River not only effectively expanded the long-standing pre-imperial coextension of Zhongguo with the Yellow and Wei River valleys, but also created “frameworks of mutual recognition” (287) that better captured the in- and out-group dynamics of the Han subjects and their neighbors. The authors move beyond the Huaxia-centric Chinese sources and the dichotomizations of Huaxia and the Other in constructionist scholarship.

The inclusion of color images of artifacts and one colored map is particularly welcome in a volume that focuses on material culture; however, the production of Han Archaeology still leaves something to be desired. Many maps are adopted from other publications of varying quality, and some are too small to clearly display the details. Figure I.1 (3) in the Introduction is an example. The four maps, reproduced from different scholarly publications, compellingly illustrate four distinct ways of mapping the Han Empire. The way that they are packed into two-thirds of a page, however, makes reading the details challenging. Map (d) confusingly mixes historical and contemporary place names, and mistakenly marks Ying, presumably the capital of the Warring States Chu Kingdom, as south of the Yangzi River. Map (a) in Figure 1.8 (50) also mixes historical names (Wan, Jiangling Ying), archaeological sites or finds (Yumeng Chuwang, Mawangdui & Zoumalou), and contemporary place names (Yicheng, Chibi). Expert readers may have little trouble with such mixing, but it unnecessarily burdens non-specialist readers. The information on the base map in Figure 7.2 (222) is missing. The location of Haihun is near present-day Nanchang in Jiangxi; therefore, it should be located south of Jingzhou in present-day Hubei.

The impact of the editorial decision not to include Chinese characters in the main text is mitigated by a glossary of Chinese names and places; still, the volume would benefit from providing a basic chronology and romanization conventions in the front matter. That would have helped explain, for example, why on page 2, the date of the Han Dynasty is listed as 202 BCE–212 CE, instead of the conventional 220 CE, and it might also have helped create a consistent usage of italicization for Chinese terms, so non-specialist readers could avoid misunderstanding yitong (2) and yitong (3; 43). Other minor corrections and typos include: Han founder Liu Bang was a native of the Huai River region, not the Han River region (12); Muling in Figure 1.1 (b) should be Maoling (30); the former Chu centered on present-day Jingzhou, not the historical Jingzhou City (49); the block quote from Wang Chong’s Lunheng on the northern bias toward the south, which was incompletely adopted from Mark Lewis (2007), is mistakenly attributed to Xunzi (49); and the daybook tablet was from Duling, not Baling (101). Further confusing typos: “a handful of countries” presumably should be “counties” (133); “textile records” should be “textual records?” (158); “Linzi tiechen” should be “Linzi tiecheng” (180); should “maple-berry” be “mulberry?” (192); “mang ethnic groups” should be “man ethnic groups” (202); “lingdao” probably should be “mudao” (231); and “Liu He’s jade suit” should be “Liu Sheng’s jade suit” (246). There is also a questionable translation for a phrase, dongyang Luli Jutianhou Waijia 東陽廬里巨田侯外家, as “Workshop of Jutian Marquis in Luli, Dongyang Commandery” (197). There is no attestation of waijia, meaning a workshop; it more likely refers to the maternal grandparents of the Marquis or his consort’s natal family.

Notwithstanding these minor flaws, Han Archaeology is a major feat. The book synthesizes a vast amount of archaeological data through the lens of empire-building, illustrating how the Han state actively managed heterogeneous spaces in which people crafted lifeways and forged identities. The volume makes a meaningful contribution to the ongoing historiographical debates on the nature of Han imperialism and its legacy by providing a view of Han state activism grounded in the material record. By focusing on the first two centuries of the Han Empire, it also complicates an increasingly prevalent view that Western Han was largely a continuation of the Qin in terms of imperial strategies and institutions. Han Archaeology presents a compelling case for how Han imperial expansion necessitated innovation and improvisation in managing the new spaces and socio-material conditions. The book is therefore unambiguously state-centered. This focus is a deliberate choice, but it is also probably necessitated by the availability of archaeological data, as state actions arguably left more visible traces in the material record. We still need a similarly grounded yet society-centered examination of the Han period to answer questions such as how people reacted to the Han state activism in the various spaces of the empire. Han Archaeology already provides some of these reactions. For example, the last section of the book portrays imperial subjects—whether they were royal relatives, ennobled elites, local functionaries, or frontier groups—not as passive receivers but as active negotiators, and occasionally strategic transgressors, of the state’s active management of the realm of death and the afterlife. A more comprehensive archaeological account of Han society relies on continuous archaeological work, particularly in Han-era settlement archaeology, which has only recently begun to develop in China. Han Archaeology not only fosters the desire for future study but will also serve as a model in this direction.