SEAA News Blog

For Chinese archaeology, 2021 was a banner year highlighted by the global breakthrough that was the beautifully preserved ancient gold masks discovered at Sanxingdui.

Last week, the Institute of Archaeology under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences announced what it believed were the most important archaeology finds in China last year. While most of the sites were discovered before 2021, they all featured remarkable excavation finds from last year.

The discoveries help paint a picture of ancient Chinese society across the millennia.

A series of talks from the Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties International Archaeological Site have been uploaded to Youtube for viewing. They will be available until the end of March - please see below for the a list of the participants and links to each of the talks. 

－－－－－－ New video －－－－－－
1st Relay Talk
Mark Hudson
"Another Japanese Archeology from the Survey of the Miyakojima Long Tomb Site"
https://youtu.be/U7zMPpF4zro

[Free E-book] Dear friends of SEAA, the Cambridge University Press will be launching a new series titled "Cambridge Elements: Ancient East Asia.” The inaugural piece, "Violence and the Rise of Centralized States in East Asia.", by Mark Edward Lewis, will be FREE to download from March 10-24, 2022. See link for more information: https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/violence-and-the-rise-of-central...

RANZAN, Saitama Prefecture--Artifacts labeled as “groundbreaking discoveries” from the ruins of structures associated with warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s Siege of Odawara in 1590 could have been prototypes of ninja weapons.

Akihiro Iwata, an archaeologist and curator at the Saitama Prefectural Ranzan Historical Museum here, said the flat stones and clay balls may well have been the forerunners of “shuriken” throwing stars and “makibishi” caltrops that later made up ninja arsenals.