In the Spring of 2010, the Early China Seminar sponsored three meetings on the Morningside campus of Columbia University, attended by scholars and students from New York and the surrounding areas on the East Coast. The first meeting of the year, convened on January 30, was entirely devoted to the Shijing (Book of Poetry) and featured two paper presentations from Professor Chang Pao-San of National Taiwan University on \"The Issue of Hermeneutics in the Study of the Shijing,\" and Professor Anne B. Kinney of the University of Virginia on \"Women in the Book of Odes.\" Professor Chang\'s paper deals mainly with the hermeneutic methods for the research of the various received or excavated texts as foundation to interpreting lines from the Shijing, while Professor Kinney\'s paper argues that the Mao-Zheng commentary tradition on the Shijing can be properly used as a rich source to study how scholars and readers in Han times might have used the text as a vehicle for propagating women\'s morality.
The seminar on March 6 brought us back to the Western Zhou dynasty when Professor David Sena of the University of Texas at Austin presented his paper on \"Narratives of Lineage History in the Shi Qiang pan and Qiu pan.\" By comparing the subtle differences in the two long inscriptions, Sena argued lineage was more a political institution than a social institution, thus shedding important light on lineage organization during the Western Zhou period.
The symposium on April 10 was devoted fully to archaeology. In her paper, \"Life in the Farming Communities of Ancient China: A Bioarchaeological Account,\" Professor Ekaterina Pechenkina of Queens College (CUNY) systematically discussed evidence for dietary deficiency, oral health, body modification, traumatic injuries and fractures observed on human skeletal remains from ca 10,000 years ago to about 5th centuries BC. The other three papers from Li Feng, Jeremiah Trinidad-Christensen, and Elizabeth Berger (all of Columbia University) together report on the current state of the archaeological field project in Guicheng, Shandong, China. This project was supported by the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation and was established in 2006 as a field collaboration between Columbia University, the Institute of Archaeology (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), and the Shandong Provincial Institute of Archaeology. With his paper, Professor Li Feng highlighted the important findings that have been made in Guciheng in 2007-2009 (especially the results of the test-excavation in Summer 2009), and he discussed their implications for understanding the settlement organization of the city as well as its social-political transition during the Eastern Zhou period. Trinidad-Christensen\'s paper reports on the use of GIS software packages to create accurate maps of soil and elevation as the framework for managing coring data; the project, when completed, will allow us to simulate underground structures before excavation. Berger\'s paper reports on the results of the systematic surface shards collection conducted in 2008-2009. This special method used in the Guicheng survey allows us to map out the continuous distribution of ceramic shards across the entire site and offers us important clues to understand the settlement organization of Guicheng and its occupational history.
All papers at the seminars were well-received and enthusiastically discussed by the audience that included not only the regular members of the Early China Seminar, but also scholars associated with the Columbia Center for Archaeology. The year has been an intellectually very fruitful one thanks to the strong support of the CCK-IUC that made these meetings possible.
Participants of the January 30 meeting of the Early China Seminar at Columbia University
Participants of the April 13 symposium held by the Early China Seminar at Columbia University | 
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