The mortuary data from the Longshan culture provide crucial information for understanding the process of socio-political change from non-stratified to stratified societies in late Neolithic China. This article identifies the variables in Longshan burials that can be correlated with social rank, and then studies four Longshan burial sites (Taosi, Chengzi, Yinjiacheng, and Zhufeng) in two steps. The first step is to classify the evidence for determining burial rank; the second step is to analyze intra-cemetery spatial patterns through time, including the location of graves within a site, the distribution of differently ranked graves and spatial relationships between graves and associated features (houses and pits), the diachronic changes observed in a site, and the depositional practices relating to ritual activities. The results of these analyses suggest that kinship-based Longshan communities were internally and externally stratified in their social structure; that this social stratification was ideologically legitimized by ritual activities that emphasized ancestor worship; and that their society was politically reinforced by an elite exchange network of high status goods at both regional and interregional levels. These social, political, and religious relationships formed the foundation for the development of civilization in prehistoric North China.

This article examines a section in the Shuihudi 睡虎地 Rishu 日書 (Daybooks) entitled “Horses” (ma 馬) which describes the instructions for the performance of a ritual to propitiate a horse spirit. The text is one of the earliest transmitted ritual liturgies involving the treatment of animals. It reveals a hitherto little known aspect of the role of animals in early Chinese religion; namely, the ritual worship of tutelary animal spirits and the performance of sacrifices for the benefit of animals. Furthermore, it corroborates the existence of magico-religious rituals involving the treatment of animals, and demonstrates that cultic worship of animal spirits, criticized by some masters of philosophy, was part of the religious practices of the elite in the late Warring States and early imperial period. The article presents an annotated translation of the “Horses” section, discusses its contents and significance in relation to equine imagery documented in received sources, and examines its value as a source for the perception of animals and animal ritual in late Warring States and early imperial China.

Excavations of a Western Han tomb at Shuangbaoshan in the vicinity of Mianyang, Sichuan, in 1993 have uncovered a black lacquered wooden carving of the human body. Naked, hairless, and roughly anatomical in character, the figurine is understood to be the earliest extant three-dimensional medical model in Chinese culture.

Ten red lines are drawn on the figurine. This article undertakes a preliminary examination of the figurine and offers an interpretation of the lines from two different perspectives. Firstly, the authors compare and contrast the lines with the eleven anatomical pathways of the mai “channels” as described in the medical manuscripts excavated at Mawangdui and Zhangjiashan. From this point of view the figurine adds to the sources that bear upon the early development of theories of pathological physiology which were first formulated in Han times and eventually became central to classical acumoxa theory. Secondly, the lines on the figurine are considered in their relationship to yangsheng “nurturing life” practices popular in elite society of this period. Certain features of the figurine that set it apart from ideas of pathological physiology seem better clarified by reference to contemporary texts, also excavated from the Mawangdui and Zhangjiashan tombs, that treat of yangsheng practices such as massage, therapeutic gymnastics, and breath cultivation.

Modern scholarship has repeatedly maintained that the separation of the hun and po souls at death was a popular Han belief, but a re-examination of the received literature suggests that hunpo dualism was at best only a scholastic model. Sources ranging from the Zuo zhuan to Han medical texts depict the hunpo as an inherent part of the properly functioning body complex, and any deficiency in the hunpo did not necessarily result in death but in distress and disease. Grave stele texts, which also never distinguish between a hun and a po suggest a different dualism—that between the hun or po with its corporeal associations on the one hand and the more rarefied shen on the other. This dualism may have found a practical expression in ancestral worship because the hunpo and body were generally confined to the cemetery but the mobile shen enjoyed its sacrifices at the lineage shrine.