The Three-age System, Chinese Genealogies of Civilisation and the Challenge of the Jade Age

This Annual Lecture is an in-person event hosted by the International Centre for Chinese Heritage and Archaeology (ICCHA) and will take place in the Archaeology Lecture Theatre G6, ground floor of the UCL Institute of Archaeology. This event is free and open to all though registration is required in advance via the booking link above. All welcome!

Abstract 

Intellectual colonialism is neither exclusively Western nor modern. Inspired by Shadreck Chirikure’s decolonial critique of how the three-age model (Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age) generated distorted narratives of Africa’s past and present, I ask what we learn from exploring how the model has been applied in the archaeology of China. ModernChinaadaptedEurope’s three-age model to fit its own, long-established colonial narrative of northern cultural, technological and political dominance. Excavations were guided by long-established text-based genealogies that located the origins and centres of Chinese civilisation firmly in the north, along the Yellow River. Though many distinguished archaeologists have challenged this unicentric vision of the Chinese past, it still retains its power. Spectacular finds of jade objects and complex city sites in the southern region of Liangzhu have recently led to proposals that a Jade Age should be added between China’s Stone and Bronze Age. Does this challenge fundamentally undermine the northern-centred master narrative, or is its more significant impact to open perspectives on the qualities valued in different materials or material skills?

About the Speaker

Francesca Bray is a historian of technology in China, with a special interest in the long-term history of agriculture and of material culture more generally. Her published works include the volume on Agriculture in Joseph Needham’s series Science and Civilisation in China (1984), Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (1997), and Moving Crops and the Scales of History (2023). She is co-editor of the 3-volume Cambridge History of Technology (forthcoming winter 2025/spring 2026), and today’s lecture is based on a chapter for that project, co-authored with the archaeologist Shadreck Chirikure. Francesca is an Emerita Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.