The Study On The Territory Of Shang Dynasty

Before the naissance of neoteric Archaeology, the history of Shang Dynasty was known only by a handful of literatures handed down from ancient times and whether Shang Dynasty was part of the true history was an issuable thesis. But along with the excavation of Yinxu in Anyang and the appearance of other latter underground data, the study of Shang Dynasty's history has been being approved and rewritten, including the study of the territory. Using different subjects, such as literatures handed down from ancient times, Archaeological data and Jiagu data, scholars have being done various researches. The study of territory in Shang Dynasty continuously develops and changes.Although the former researches have been abundant, and made us have clearer acknowledgement of Shang Dynasty's territory, yet there are still some questions that needs more discuss and deep study. Firstly, because of the different cognitions of Archaeological cultures and different textual research of literatures, scholars got diverse conclusions on the range of Shang Dynasty's territory, so we must first have an clear and specific of Archaeological cultures, analyze the ranges of Shang cultures and non- Shang cultures, and then find out the general range of Shang Dynasty's territory; Secondly, former researches mostly focused on the plane of Shang Dynasty's territory or just simply referred to the changes of early or late phases and the discuss on the changes of Shang Dynasty's territory is not enough. Discuss on the changes of Shang Dynasty's territory is one of the research directions of Shang Archaeology in the 21st century. Integrating former stage researches, we discuss the range of Shang Culture by early, middle and late three phases. What's more, we divide every phase into three periods to search after the changes of Shang Dynasty's territory. Finally, based on the Archaeological cultures and combining the study of literatures, we try to analyze the characteristics of Shang Dynasty's territory and explain the reasons of some phenomena on the changes of territory.