Routledge handbook of early Chinese history

The study of early China has been radically transformed over the past fifty years by archaeological discoveries, including both textual and non-textual artifacts.

Thanks to the huge fund of new data provided by archaeology, historians are now keenly aware that traditional accounts of the period are inadequte because they are partisan, prescriptive, and incomplete.

Excavations of settlements and tombs have demonstrated that most people did not lead their lives in accordance with the rituals canons, while previously unknown documents have shown that most received histories were written retrospectively by victors, and present a correspondingly skewed and anachronistic perspective.

This handbook provides an authoritive survey of Chinese history from the Stone Age to A.D. 220.