Person:

Flad, Rowan

AGU Chapman Conference on Climates, Past Landscapes, and Civilizations; Santa Fe, New Mexico, 21–25 March 2011; The fortunes of human societies are intimately linked to the environments that sustain them. This has been true from the first emergence of human ancestors through to the present day. An AGU Chapman Conference was held to discuss the relationship between past people and their environments. Participants examined the state of the field, debated issues of contention, and formulated ways that such cross-disciplinary research can progress. Scientists' increasing ability to generate high-resolution climate records has proliferated studies that link the rise and fall of cultures to climate change. This meeting brought together scholars from across the divide between Earth sciences and archaeology to derive a deeper understanding of how humans have reacted to and shaped the changing environment.

Divination is a form of ritual practice frequently employed as an important source of social and political power. Elaborate forms of divination can be crucial to state control, and the power of elaborated divining techniques has widespread influence. In ancient China, as elsewhere, divination was the domain of ritual specialists who used their skills to mediate uncertainty, but the role that these specialists played in society differed considerably from one place to another. Using divination remains from the Neolithic, Shang and Zhou periods of China, the relationship between divination elaboration and power is examined. The paper proposes that more elaborate divination procedures are associated with bureaucratic institutions as a source of state power, whereas other contexts involve more heterogeneous divination practices. A survey of consecutive periods of the Chinese Neolithic and Bronze Age demonstrates such a relationship between elaboration and state control of divination.