ART HISTORY LECTURE SERIES: LOTHAR VON FALKENHAUSEN

Join us for this lecture by Lothar von Falkenhausen, Department of Art History, UCLA.

"New Light on the First Archaeological Discovery of Chinese Bronzes"

A large number of bronzes—perhaps more than one hundred—were unearthed at Xinzheng in central China in 1923. Even though many details of the excavation were unrecorded, this discovery marks a milestone in the history of Chinese archaeology because this was the first time that a coherent assemblage from a single tomb was made available for scholarly study. The exact dating of these materials has, however, remained controversial. In the intervening decades, a large number of archaeological discoveries have been made at Xinzheng, allowing us to define with some precision the local bronze-manufacturing tradition in this part of China. The study of these new finds suggests a new and somewhat surprising interpretation of the bronze assemblage found in 1923.