Metalworking in Bronze Age China: The Lost-Wax Process
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Metalworking in Bronze Age China: The Lost-Wax Process By Peng Pe ...

Chapter 2:  Metalworking in Bronze Age China
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Notes

1. For instance, many nationalistic arguments for the independent invention of metallurgy in China (e.g., Tang, “Zhongguo Qingtongqi de Qiyuan yu Fazhan”) have been systematically refuted by a dispassionate Chinese scholar, An Zhimin. For details, see An, “Some Problems Concerning Early Chinese Copper and Bronze Artifacts”; An, “On Early Copper and Bronze Objects in Ancient China.”
2. See Fitzgerald-Huber, “Qijia and Erlitou,” 29–39. One problem with Fitzgerald-Huber’s theory, as she herself acknowledges, lies in the “presumed chronological discrepancy” between the Qijia and the apparently later Seima-Turbino cultures. As Fitzgerald-Huber narrated, “whereas the calibrated carbon-14 dates for the Qijia culture cluster around the year 2000 B.C., the Seima-Turbino, more loosely dated on the evidence of their occasional intermingling with the Sintashta-Petrovka cultures of the Tobol River area, have consistently been assigned to a later time, roughly coeval with Shang. Chernykh, for instance, estimates that the consolidation of the Seima-Turbino took place no earlier than the seventeenth century B.C.” (“Qijia and Erlitou,” 49–50). Yet more and more evidence supports Fitzgerald-Huber’s reassessment of the Seima-Turbino chronology already reassigned to between the 22nd and the 18th to 17th centuries BCE by Chernykh (e.g., “Ancient Metallurgy in the Eurasian Steppes and China: Problems of Interactions,” 2; “Formation of the Eurasian Steppe Belt Cultures: Viewed through the Lens of Archaeometallurgy and Radiocarbon Dating,” 136). This adjusted chronology fits quite well with Fitzgerald-Huber’s hypothesis linking the Qijia and the Seima-Turbino.
3. For a detailed description of Seima-Turbino metalworking, see Shaw and Jameson, A Dictionary of Archaeology, 517–518.
4. For a review of these discoveries, see Mei, “Qijia and Seima-Turbino,” 35–36; Lin, “Saiyima-Tuerbinnuo Wenhua yu Shiqian Sichou zhi Lu,” 51–59.
5. To date, more than a dozen such spearheads have been recognized in China; they are distributed from Qinghai and Gansu in the northwest to as far south as Henan Xichuan, which is even some distance to the south of Erlitou. Although some of the samples are certain to be local imitations, the intrusion of the Seima-Turbino impact