Beyond State Formation: Mass Production andCommercialization in Shang China
Roderick CAMPBELL1
ABSTRACTThe topic of state formation has undergone radical change since the 1980’s. In the opening
decades of the twenty-ﬁrst century many scholars came to doubt the utility of the concept ofancient “state” for archaeology even as focus changed from deﬁning socio-evolutionary stages todetailing how particular ancient polities worked. This shift ushered in a renewed interest in therelationship between polities, their economies and urbanization. In this paper I will explore therelationship between political economy and urbanization in Shang China from the perspective ofcommercialization. I will argue that despite inﬂuential redistributive models, the Shang economy
was signiﬁcantly commercialized, especially during the Anyang period. This commercialization
was part of a long process and it created a positive feedback loop between commerce, industry
and urbanization. This process is exempliﬁed in the explosive growth of gigantic bone workshops
at the Shang capital of Anyang, mass-producing high-value added artifacts for wide distribution.
This linkage between industry, commercialization and economic power laid the foundation for the
thriving economy of the Eastern Zhou period.
KEYWORDS: commercialization, urbanization, political economy, Bronze Age China, Shang

Introduction
There have been many diﬀerent answers to the question of when state formation began
in ancient China, from Keightley’s (1983, p. 558) argument that the Shang 商 became
an incipient state at the end of the Anyang 安阳 period around 1100 BC, to Bagley’s(1999, pp. 156–157) claim that Erligang 二里岗 was a state at around 1500 BC and Liu& Chen (2003, pp. 29–35) arguing that the ﬁrst Chinese state was Erlitou 二里头 at 1800
BC. Even more recently, Shelach & Jaﬀe (2014, pp. 338–342) have argued for state
formation during the Longshan 龙山 period at the end of the third millennium BC, while
Renfrew & Liu (2018, p. 988) claimed that Liangzhu 良渚 was a state, pushing “Chinese”
state formation back to early third or late fourth millennium BC. While archaeologicaldiscovery has helped bolster the trend toward ever earlier dates, a key reason for themultiplicity of opinions is the lack of consensus on what a “state” is. In terms of site
sizes, concentration of population and labor, many early centers in what is now China do
1 Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University, 15 East 84th Street, NYC, NY, 10028,

USA (Rbc2@nyu.edu)
Category: Original Article Received: 16 January 2022; Accepted: 31 August 2023
JAPANESE JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY 11 (2023): 3–19

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indeed look very impressive, but what do we actually know about how their institutions
were organized or how their political economies functioned? I would argue that without
more granular research and focus on speciﬁc processes, the game of determining what is
and is not a state is meaningless. The process I wish to focus on in this paper concerns therelationship between commercialization, urbanization and political economy. The period
in question will be the Central Plains of China during a period conventionally known as
the Bronze Age, between around 1850–1050 BC. The reason for this focus is that until
recently, the Chinese Bronze Age was assumed to have very little commercialization, whileurbanization, political economy and polity formation were assumed to be entirely a matterof centralized control. I will argue that this view is incorrect and that commercialization
and associated phenomena played a signiﬁcant role in the development of the Central
Plains Bronze Age polities and subsequent history.

Ancient Polities, Ancient Political Economies and Their Relationships
In the archaeological literature on complex polities, “the state” is used in two basic ways.
The ﬁrst is in the sense of “the government” or “the polity,” referring to an executive entitythat that is made of many, often contradictory, parts but, for convenience sake, is being taken
as a collective. The second use of “the state” is evolutionary, as in bands, tribes, chiefdoms
and states (Sahlins & Service 1960), and, I would argue, as problematic as “chiefdom”(Yoﬀee 1993), for many of the same reasons (Campbell 2009, pp. 823–824). In addition to
the increasing recognition of the variety of ancient complex polities, it could also be argued
that the “ancient state” is an anachronistic oxymoron. “State” came to have its current,
meaning as a political entity only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in tandem withthe theorizing of European absolutist monarchies and then nation states (Ferguson 2003, p.
84). As I have written in other places, prominent neo-evolutionary theories of the state based
their deﬁnitions on authors (such as Max Weber) who were explicitly discussing the modern
state and in doing so, smuggled Eurocentric and Modernist assumptions into the analysis ofancient political forms (Campbell 2009, pp. 823–824, see also A. Smith 2003, pp. 84–85).
For this reason, the less freighted term of “early complex polity” is preferred.
Nevertheless, the issue with neo-evolutionary state theory was not just terminological.
While the nature of the evolutionary pathway (linear or multi-linear) was debated in the
1970’s and 1980’s (e.g. Claessen & Skalnik 1978), by the turn of the millennium it had
become clear that the great variety of early complex polities was frustrating deﬁnitionaland developmental analytical goals. This recognition prompted a re-alignment of research
toward the goal of understanding how ancient polities worked (e.g. Marcus & Feinman
1998, p. 3; Trigger 2003, p. 40). In practice this has meant a recognition of the complexityof social complexity and the need to disaggregate many of the aspects of ancient polities© Japanese Archaeological Association

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that were once assumed to be parts of socio-evolutionary packages. Thus, in the decadesof the twenty-ﬁrst century, archaeologists of ancient polities have shifted focus to topics asdiverse as political landscapes (A. Smith 2003), polity networks and boundaries (Campbell2009), sovereignty (Smith 2011; Routledge 2014), urbanization (M.L. Smith 2003),
political economy (M.E. Smith 2004), and so on.
The particular developmental aspect of early complex polities that I wish to focus onin this paper is political economy and, in particular, commercialization. While it was once
thought that commercialization was a feature incompatible with early complex polities,
archaeologists working in Mesoamerica have shown otherwise. M.E. Smith (2004, pp.
78–80) marks commercialization as a major variable in ancient political economies, while
Feinman & Nicholas (2004, p. 170) suggest that major diﬀerences between highland
Mesoamerican and Peruvian polity political economies had their bases in deep-time
diﬀerences in the production and distribution of goods. In other words, the degree ofcommercialization in a political economy is a major variable with ramiﬁcations for various
aspects of political and economic organization.

The Chinese Bronze Age
K.C. Chang, based on evidence available in the 1980’s, famously argued that the
Shang kingdom was built on the foundations of a stone age economy and that its great
concentration of wealth was the result of political rather than technological or economic
innovation (Chang 1983, p. 8; 1989, pp. 160–165). The cities of the Chinese Bronze Agewere thought to be “king’s cities,” or even ceremonial centers, lacking the merchants andmarkets that would only come into being in the Iron Age (Chang 1985, p. 61; Chen 2003,
p. 290; Falkenhausen 2006, p. 222). More recent work has complicated these assertions,though the question of how to characterize the relationship between urbanism, politicalinstitutions and economy in Bronze Age China remain.
Perhaps the ﬁrst issue that must be dealt with is the changing understanding of thechronological and spatial deﬁnition of the Bronze Age in Mainland East Asia and its
relationship to the development of complex polities (Table 1). In the sense that K.C.
Chang (1983, p. 8) and other scholars have used it, the Chinese Bronze Age is signiﬁcantfor its diﬀerences from other Bronze Ages. The bronze of the Chinese Bronze Age, ormore accurately, the Central Plains Bronze Age, was used primarily for ritual vessels cast
via complex piece mold procedures (Chang 1983, pp. 101–106). The centrality of thesevessels motivated Chang’s claim for the primary importance of ritual and politics overeconomy (Chang 1983, p. 8; 1989, pp. 160–165), inspired Wu (1995, pp. 1–6) to argue thatthey instantiated monumentality for the period, and Bagley (1999, p. 138) that they wereindexical of civilization. At the same time, work of the last two decades has shown that not© Japanese Archaeological Association

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only did bronze production begin centuries before the Central Plains in the northwest (Li2005; Jaang 2015), but that metallurgy was introduced to geographical China along with a
Eurasian package of domesticated ungulates, crops and possibly wheeled vehicles (Yuan& Campbell 2009; Jaﬀe & Flad 2018). Nevertheless, as the major Yangtze river centers of
third millennia BC show, there is no necessary relationship between social complexity andbronze in East Asia. By focusing on the Central Plains Bronze Age (ca. 1850–600 BC) andespecially on the Anyang period (ca. 1250–1050 BC), I am not asserting the claim that thiswas the time or the place of the earliest complex polities in mainland East Asia, only thatit makes sense to trace political economic development within a single tradition and a timeand place where the data is relatively robust.
During the Central Plains Bronze Age, the political landscape was characterized bystrongly primate centers which show dramatic increase in size from Erlitou’s 300ha toAnyang’s 3 000 (ZSKY 2003; Campbell 2014; Shelach & Jaﬀe 2014) (Figure 1). That is
to say, during the heyday of Erlitou (ca. 1850–1600 BC), Erligang (ca. 1600–1400 BC)
and Anyang (ca. 1250–1050 BC), each of these centers was the largest site in the Central
Plains and, in the case of Erligang and Anyang, up to 100 times larger than the next largest
contemporaneous site. The political landscape thus appears to be more reminiscent of
Teotihuacan with a single centripetal mega-center than Mesopotamian or Mayan city states
or even later Chinese territorial polities.
During the period from Erlitou to Anyang, Central Plains mortuary hierarchy and ritualexpenditure vastly increased while the scale and sophistication of production also grew by leaps
and bounds (Campbell 2014, 2018). In terms of urban development, the major centers all beganwith a large site and heterogeneous population and then doubled or tripled in size over the twoor three centuries of their occupation (ZSKY 2003; Campbell 2014; Campbell et al. 2021).
These facts suggest initial colonization and, thus, top-down rather than organic, bottom up
processes at the beginning. At the same time, if the initial settlement size suggests a coordinatedmovement of people, the subsequent explosive growth requires other explanations. In otherwords, why did Central Plains centers grow so large over the course of their occupation?
Table 1.

Central Plains Bronze Age chronology.
Archaeological Period

Dates

Erlitou
Erligang
Xiaoshuangqiao-Huanbei
AnyangWestern Zhou

ca. 1850–1600 BC
ca. 1600–1400 BC
ca. 1400–1250 BC
ca. 1250–1050 BC
ca. 1050–771 BC© Japanese Archaeological Association

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Figure 1. Map of sites: 1: Anyang; 2: Zhengzhou (Erligang); 3: Guandimiao; 4: Erlitou; 5:Sanmenxia; 6. Zhouyuan; 7: Taijiasi; 8: Liangzhu; 9: Panlongcheng.

An older, neo-evolutionary model of political economy would have explained thegrowth in site size, production and hierarchy as the natural outcomes of increases in
specialization, standardization, centralization and control and all of the above as marking
a transition to “states” at some critical threshold. As mentioned above, this sort of neoevolutionary model has been largely abandoned in the anthropological archaeologicalliterature in favor of more complex and nuanced approaches, even as the idea that earlycomplex polities necessarily have redistributive economies has been rejected and the topic
of commercialization has emerged as a major research agenda. Nevertheless, the bestknown explicit model for Central Plains political economies and state formation, that of
Liu & Chen (2003), begins with just these neo-evolutionary assumptions. In this model“the state” acts as a centralizing, expansionist, hierarchical, resource-hungry machine—with raw materials moving from the periphery to secondary centers which process andship them on to the center where attached specialists manufacture prestige goods which“the state” then redistributes to loyal subordinate elites. As can be seen in Figure 2, there© Japanese Archaeological Association

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Figure 2. Erlitou elite-redistributive political economic model (Liu & Chen 2003, Figure 25, p. 138).

is no horizontal interaction between lower tier sites, the entire economy is based on nested
vertical or tributary relations controlled by “the state.” The political economy is proposed
to be entirely centralized, redistributive and lacking in commercialization.
The Liu & Chen (2003) model was largely based on evidence for bronze production
in a single workshop near the palace–temple area at Erlitou and the presence of a nearby
turquoise workshop. Given the location and type of production, these industries wereargued to be instances of “state-controlled craft specialization” (Liu & Chen 2003, p. 64;
Liu & Chen 2012, p. 268). Furthermore, the correlation of salt and metal resources with theputative Erlitou and later Erligang expansion suggested to the authors that the growth ofthe polity was largely motivated by resource acquisition and that its political economy was
redistributive and focused on prestige goods. While this model can and has been critiqued
on a number of grounds ranging from neo-evolutionary assumptions (Campbell 2018, p.
48), to the (mis)use of settlement hierarchies (Peterson & Drennan 2011, p. 87), to theassignation of political identity to sites bases on pottery (Campbell 2018, pp. 38–39), it isthe empirical, economic critiques that matter to us here.
More recent work, including by Liu & Chen (Liu et al. 2007; Liu et al. 2013), has cast
doubt on the Liu & Chen (2003) elite redistributive model. Firstly, research on a stone tool
production site called Huizhui 灰嘴 has provided evidence of the specialized production ofstone spades which circulated widely but were not under centralized political control (Liuet al. 2007, p. 101). Huizhui was located in the Erlitou hinterland and was a site specialized
in stone tool production both before and after Erlitou’s rise. Not only did the type of
production not change after the advent of Erlitou, the stone tools produced at Huizhui© Japanese Archaeological Association

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were widely distributed and not merely produced for use at Erlitou (Liu et al. 2007, p. 97).
Secondly, the site of Nanwa 南洼 seems to have specialized in white prestige ceramics
which were widely distributed in elite burials during the Erlitou period (Zhengzhou Daxue
Lishixueyuan 2014, p. 781). At the same time, a study of white ceramics consumed at
Erlitou has demonstrated that they derived from a number of sources—all suggestinga lack of centralized control over this prestige good industry (Liu et al. 2007, p. 99).
Together these facts suggest that a number of sites were producing white ceramics and yet
there is no evidence that either the production or distribution of this relatively widespread
prestige good was controlled by the rulers of Erlitou. In addition, a recent study of boneworkshops at Erlitou shows that even though some workshops were located near thepalace–temple area, they were small-scale and produced a wide array of goods. The rangeof goods, from utilitarian tools to prestige combs and pins suggests the production wasfor a wide range of consumers rather than attached specialization for elite consumption.
Taken together, these facts indicate that, contrary to Liu & Chen (2003)’s redistributive
political economic model, there was a signiﬁcant amount of non-centralized economic
activity and some degree of horizontal economic exchange (Campbell et al. 2021). Indeed,
there is evidence of regional specialization in craft production and trade even before theErlitou period (Campbell et al. 2021). While none of this contradicts the idea that the rulersof the Erlitou polity attempted to monopolize certain forms of prestige goods production(e.g. bronze and turquoise), it minimally means that only a small part of the economy wasorganized this way and that it cannot account for the growth of the Erlitou polity or urban
center. An alternative model to a centralizing redistributive political economy, analogous to
the situation Feinman & Nicholas (2004) describe for highland Mesoamerica, sees a deeptime tradition of local specialization, trade and markets. In this model, centralizing politicalactors encourage, participate in, and tax, exchange rather than reorganizing it under aredistributive model. The evidence of elites participating in exchange, as well as non-elitecraft specialization and exchange all point to the second model (Campbell 2021).
What does this mean in terms of commercialization? According to Feinman & Garraty(2010, p. 178), commercialization concerns the relative signiﬁcance or breadth of market
exchange (see ME Smith 2004 for a slightly diﬀerent deﬁnition). Market exchange, in turn,is largely inferred contextually, ideally at multiple scales ranging from the household tothe polity system (Feinman & Garraty 2010, p. 178; Campbell et al. 2021). In the Erlitou
case, it is clear that non-redistributive mechanisms existed for some elite and non-elitecraft goods. Given the evidence for the existence of horizontal, non-centralized exchange,
it would be strange if those mechanisms were only used for stone tools, white pottery andbone artifacts. A more likely scenario is that there were traders and markets of some kind,
and, in fact, these had pre-existed the rise of Erlitou.
While work on Erligang production sites is less advanced than even Erlitou, the presence© Japanese Archaeological Association

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of at least two bronze workshops (Henansheng 2001, p. 384) and bronze casting beyond
the capital poses problems for the argument that this industry was centralized. If the middle
Yangzi center of Panlongcheng 盘龙城 (Figure 1) was part of the Erligang polity then bronze
casting was not centralized at the polity level. A recent study showing that Erligang andPanlongcheng bronzes had substantially diﬀerent metal sources not only demonstrates thatritual bronze production was not monopolized by the Zhengzhou 郑州 megacenter but thatmetal sources were not controlled from the center either (Liu et al. 2019; Pollard et al. 2017),
despite early arguments that the Panglongcheng site was a colony of the Erligang state,emplaced to control the copper mines of the Middle Yangzi (Rawson 1982; Liu & Lu 1998).
Panlongcheng is also interesting for its potential role in the circulation of anotherprestige good—glazed and unglazed stoneware. It is widely believed that these high-ﬁred
ceramics were ﬁrst (and perhaps only) produced in the Yangzi area. They are associatedwith elite burials in the Central Plains region and are considered a prestige good. The factthat Panlongcheng has greater quantities and more variety of stone ware suggests it may
have served as a conduit for its circulation to the north (Zhang 2014, p. 57), while at thesame time arguing against centralized redistributive mechanisms.
At the level of the settlement, Zhengzhou bronze casting occurred in two diﬀerent areasand produced largely the same types of goods (Henansheng 2001, p. 384). The broad arrayof products, dominated by tools, also problematizes the idea that bronze production was
focused on prestige goods. While work on Erligang bone workshops is still preliminary,
the remains are similar to Erlitou in that there were multiple sites, they were relatively
small-scale and they produced a wide range of goods from elite to quotidian, again
suggesting a wide spectrum of consumers (Henansheng 2001, p. 469). In short, there isnothing in the organization of Erligang craft production that can be deﬁnitively associatedwith a centralized redistributive economy, elite or otherwise.
With Anyang, the situation is much clearer. There are multiple industrial areas eachcontaining bronze, bone and other industries (ZSKY 2003, pp. 299–300; Li 2007, pp.
194–195) (Figure 3). These industries are large-scale and redundant in that workshops
in diﬀerent industrial zones produce the same types of goods as those produced in otherzones (Campbell 2014, p. 139). At the same time, the current understanding of site
structure is that Anyang (or the Great Settlement Shang as it was known in the oracle-bone
inscriptions) was a vast agglomeration of lineage settlements (Tang & Jing 2009). Thisand later textual evidence suggests the existence of multiple, competing crafting lineages
all producing similar products. In the case of bronze production, the workshops were hugeand many tens of thousands of mold fragments have been recovered (Li 2003, p. 206).
The majority of these fragments were from ritual vessel castings although the workshops
also produced a range of other bronze objects as well. The redundant production of bronze
vessels, tools and weapons in multiple locations argues against centralized organization,© Japanese Archaeological Association

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Figure 3.

Map of Anyang.

while the workshop scale and range of products argues against its redistributive nature(Campbell et al. 2021).
In 2006 and 2007 a salvage excavation at Tiesanlu, Anyang 铁三路安阳 unearthed amassive bone workshop with 34 metric tons of animal bone recovered from a 10m wide
trench (Campbell et al. 2011, pp. 1281–1282). Tiesanlu was one of at least three majorbone working areas at Anyang and probably not the largest (Li et al. 2011, p. 7). Ongoingwork commenced in 2009 by myself and my collaborators at the Chinese Academy ofSocial Science, Institute of Archaeology has been able to reconstruct the production
process, demonstrate the scale of production and its specialization in hairpins (Campbell
et al. 2011; Li et al. 2011). These were mass-produced in batches of standardized forms(Figure 4). Figure 4 shows a batch of quality control rejected pin heads in four diﬀerent
production stages all recovered from a single context. It was estimated that Anyang’s
workshops produced millions of hairpins, overproducing even the consumption of thecapital by a factor of three (Campbell et al. 2011, p. 1294). This raises the questions of
why the massive scale and where did all the pins go?
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Figure 4.

Mass-produced hairpin head wasters from Tiesanlu, Anyang.

In 2006 another salvage project uncovered the Anyang period site of Guandimiao 关帝庙—the only well-preserved extensively excavated Shang village. An estimated 75% of theoriginal village was excavated including 22 houses and 23 pottery kilns, which, along withpottery production tools, kiln wasters and other production debris, suggests that the village
was specialized in pottery crafting (Li et al. 2018, p. 1527). A zooarchaeological study ofremains excavated from the site has likewise shown that the village raised pigs and possibly
cattle for exchange—together demonstrating that Shang villages like Guandimiao were not
autarkic but rather highly integrated into the larger economy (Hou et al. 2019, p. 10).
Also of interest is the discovery that that a signiﬁcant portion of the worked boneassemblage at Guandimiao derived from the large-scale bone workshops at Anyang (Houet al. 2018, p. 308). In Figure 5 the pins on the right are from Anyang, the ones on theleft were from Guandimiao. Although they have all suﬀered damage from use and postdepositional processes, they share design, production steps, tool marks and evidenceof mass production—all in distinction from the rest of the Guandimiao bone artifact
assemblage, which diﬀers in all of these characteristics (Hou et al. 2018, p. 307). This is
all despite the fact that Guandimiao was a tiny village 200km from Anyang. This, in turn,
testiﬁes to the wide distribution of the products of the Anyang workshops but begs thequestion as to why the Guandimiao villagers did not produce their own hairpins.

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Figure 5.

Comparison of Anyang and Guandimiao hairpins.

Returning to Anyang and the Tiesanlu workshop, we can see several features which
contributed to the domination by workshops of the capital—these include the concentrationof resources, consumers, skilled workers and advanced tools. Vast quantities of cattle bone
were available due to elite sacriﬁcial feasting (Campbell 2023) and the Great settlement
Shang was a 30km2 urban center, likely one of the great population centers of the world
at the end of the second millennium BC (ZSKY 2003, p. 296). At the same time, thereis evidence that advanced tools such as bronze saws were only available at Anyang
during this period. Together these factors contributed to the creation of economies ofscale allowing bone artifacts to be produced in large quantities much more eﬃciently inAnyang’s workshops than elsewhere.
Just how important was the invention of bronze saws to bone hairpin production wasclariﬁed during replication experiments performed at Shandong University in 2018. Theseexperiments demonstrated that the eﬃciency of bronze saws for working large mammalbone was revolutionary—orders of magnitude more eﬃcient than serrated bronze knives,and an even bigger improvement over stone or shell blades (Wang et al. 2022). This result
and the fact that bronze saws seem to have been concentrated in Anyang during this period
further clariﬁes the relative advantage that the large-scale bone workshops possessed.
Bronze saws make high-quality raw materials like cattle limb bones relatively easy towork—and allowed the crafters of the capital to focus on high-value added products like
hairpins, leaving categories of easier to make artifacts to local, small-scale craftspeople.
The signiﬁcance of mass production at Anyang is as follows: The multiple redundantworkshops suggest a lack of centralized control while the specialization in high valueadded commodities suggests a concern for maximization of proﬁt. The large scale ofproduction and wide distribution indicate both economies of scale and eﬃcient means of
distribution. The concentration of raw materials, skill and technology gave the workshops© Japanese Archaeological Association

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a comparative advantage, while the concentration of consumers in the capital reduced
transaction costs and enabled the increase in scale. In short, these features, combined with theprior existence of non-centralized economic networks suggests that not only was the Anyang
period Shang economy signiﬁcantly commercialized, but that this commercialization drove
technological innovation and dramatic increase in productive scale.

Discussion
Returning to the topic of complex polities, urbanization and commercialization, I propose
the following relationship for the Central Plains Bronze Age—primary centers were foundedby elites, their retinues and their associated lineages, some of whom were specialized crafts
producers. These primate centers were centers of population, industry and ritual and attracted
both commerce and skilled labor. The requisites of demand, skill, technology and resources
fueled further technological and economic development, with major industries becoming
an important source of wealth, further enhancing the power of the lineages who controlled
them. This feedback loop not only served to increase power, commerce and industry, butalso the size of urban centers which grew ever larger in the Central Plains over the courseof the second millennium BC. The Anyang period marks a watershed in this developmental
process, when workshops dramatically increased in size and, in the case of bone working,began to specialize in the mass production of high return products for wide consumption.
This suggests a motivation that goes beyond elite provisioning and, in the wider context ofcommercialization, suggests proﬁt seeking behavior.
According to Max Weber’s urban typology (Weber 1968, pp. 1215–1219), the Central
Plains capitals were mostly consumer cities, pulling in resources and sponsoring crafts
for consumption by the political elite (see Finley 1977; Morris 2005 for a discussion of
Greek cities). Nevertheless, from at least Erlitou times, production and probably trade werealso important functions of these centers. A sense of the close connection between central
places and certain types of production can be seen in the recently discovered site of Taijiasi
台家寺 in Anhui 安徽 (Wuhan Daxue Lishixueyuan Kaoguxi & Anhuisheng Wenwu Kaogu
Yanjiusuo 2018). Dating to the Xiaoshuangqiao-Huanbei period the site appears to be theadaptation of the Central Plains Bronze tradition to local conditions with the site taking theform of an archipelago of mounds with diﬀerent functions. Signiﬁcantly, the mound withelite architecture also contains bronze and bone workshops, as if these forms of production
were as essential to the status of the site as palaces. Combining these lines of evidence,
it seems that elite centers of the Central Plains Bronze Age were not only locations forparticipation in ritual or politics but also for the acquisition of prestige and other craft
goods. For those controlling the production of those goods, this was a source of wealthand thus power. This is the reason that by the Anyang period, the nature of some of the© Japanese Archaeological Association

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workshops had begun to change, mass producing quotidian goods for broad consumption.
The association of commercialization, urban centers and craft production as a source ofeconomic power created a feedback loop whereby each factor led to increases in the others.
The relationship between urban centers and large-scale craft production continued after
the fall of the Shang dynasty. Work in the Zhouyuan has revealed a patchwork of elite estates
and workshops spread over a 20 or 30km2 area. These include multiple sites for bronze
working, bone working and other industries as well (Zhouyuan Kaogudui 2011). Evidence
for production for commercial exchange is evidenced not only in bone workshops similar
to those at Anyang but also a stone workshop mass producing stone earrings for exchange(Zhao 2017; Sun 2008). In addition, over the course of the Western Zhou, formal workshops
and mass production spread beyond the capital sites to relatively minor settlements such as
Guo near Sanmenxia where a single midden produced thousands of wasters and debitage forthe standardized production of a single type of pin (Ma et al. 2015). In the Western Zhou,
the economy, much like politics, had a large de-centralized and multivalent component, but
production and revenues from exchange seem to be a source of economic power for at least
some aristocratic lineages. This early foray into mass production and widespread commercial
exchange is the true basis for the Eastern Zhou economic expansion and the growth ofcommerce and manufacturing in Eastern Zhou cities. The ﬂourishing economy of the Eastern
Zhou period and early empires had a Bronze Age basis.
In a broader comparative perspective, neither Weber’s typology nor categorization ofcommercial vs political or consumer versus productive cities is satisifactory since they do
not account for developmental processes within these broad typologies—how the natureof production can change in tandem with commercialization and, in changing, alter thenature of urban centers. Commercialization is a spectrum and, as such, a variable in thedevelopment of urbanism, as well economic and political organization.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank professor SASAKI for his kind invitation the 2021 JapaneseArchaeological Association meeting and for the invitation to publish a version of that talkin the Japanese Journal of Archaeology. I would also like to thank the reviewers for theircomments. I am grateful to Duckworth publishers for permission to reproduce Figure 25
from Liu & Chen (2003).

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