Includes bibliographical reference and appendix.

This volume, I believe, is the first one that exclusively sets its focus ongender studies in Chinese archaeology. It is indeed true that theMarxist evolutionary framework on history demanded the inclusion of aperiod of domination by matrilineal clans. Therefore, Chinese fieldarchaeologists often made great efforts to record data that would appearuseful to substantiate such a developmental scheme in prehistory. It isworth acknowledging that some erstwhile neglected phenomena inarchaeological investigation can now be recognized. One of such cases,for instance, was the reconstruction of lineages from the materials exca-vated from the Yuanjunmiao Neolithic cemetery, which was successfullyused by Chinese archaeologists to identify a certain “stage of evolution"in ancient human society. Nevertheless, the dogmatic application of anytheory more often leads to a formulaic interpretation and the mishandlingor even distortion of otherwise useful data.
This volume consists of twelve chapters that deal with a great variety ofsubjects. Some analyze burial sites, some mortuary arts, and some certainspecific kinds of images. A wide range of time and space are covered,including Neolithic, Shang, Zhou,Spring and Autumn, Warring States,and Han periods; and areas including the steppeland of Inner Mongolia,wooded regions of Manchuria,Shanxi and Shaanxi Provinces in the Yel-low River Basin, as well as Hebei floodplain and the mountainous regionsof northern Yunnan in southwest China. It is difficult, therefore, to drawany general conclusions from these scattered and sporadically distributedcases. The editors fully recognize such a difficulty, and the volume isorganized as an explorative project to go beyond the Marxist unilinearevolutionary theoretical framework and to introduce questions aboutgender relevant to Chinese archaeology.
Casting sights on future scholarly investigations in this particular sub-field of Chinese archaeology, I want to raise a few topics that may bepotentially useful. For instance, several authors in this volume mentioned