Crossing the Yellow Sea

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In-Person

Date: October28,2025

Location: ISAW Lecture Hall, United States

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The Exchange of Metalworking Knowledge and Technologies in the Interconnected Ancient East Asian World The first regions in East Asia to develop sophisticated metalworking traditions from the second millennium BCE onward were the various cultural and political centers of Inner China, including the historical Shang and Zhou dynasties based in the Yellow River valley. Beyond this world across the Yellow Sea, the interconnected societies of Northeast China, the Korean Peninsula, and southern Japan - the frontiers of the Sinitic world in antiquity - engaged in the exchange of bronze and later iron metallurgy both with one another and with different regions in China in the first millennium BCE. This talk explores the richness, intensity, and complexity of this cross-cultural exchange, particularly in light of recent advances in archaeometry that allow us to go beyond tracing the trade and circulation of objects within this wider region to look deeper at how local societies actively selected and folded technological knowledge into their own local lifeways and socio-political systems.

Participants & Organizers

Institute for the Study of the Ancient World(Organizer, Host)

<a href="https://isaw.nyu.edu/" class="small text-muted">https://isaw.nyu.edu/</a>

ISAW is a center for advanced scholarly research and graduate education, which aims to encourage particularly the study of the economic, religious, political and cultural connections between ancient civilizations. It offers both doctoral and postdoctoral programs, with the aim of training a new generation of scholars who will enter the global academic community and become intellectual leaders.