ABSTRACT
Fufeng county of Shaanxi province includes perhaps the most thoroughly explored extensive archaeological site in all of China. The western edge of the county, where it borders on Qishan county, comprises part of what is usually referred to as the Zhouyuan or the Plain of Zhou, the traditional homeland of the Zhou people.1 The Zhouyuan is located about one hundred kilometers to the west of Xi’an, twenty-five kilometers to the south of the Qi Shan mountain range and about the same distance to the north of the Wei River in west central Shaanxi province. As defined by modern archaeological excavations, the site covers only about ten square kilometers, slightly more than three kilometers north-south, and slightly less than that east-west, more or less bounded by the present towns of Jingdang (in Qishan county), and Huangdui and Qicun (both in Fufeng county); see Figure 1.1. Throughout later Chinese history, this small area has been the locus of numerous discoveries of early Zhou cultural artifacts, especially inscribed bronze vessels. In the 1970s, archaeologists from the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (now Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), from the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology, and from the cultural units of the respective counties joined forces to explore the area thoroughly. While no formal report of this archaeological campaign has yet been forthcoming, most of its significant discoveries have been published piecemeal, and there is a comprehensive cultural record of Fufeng county.2
