ABSTRACT
In the late 1990s, excavators digging at the Chinese Bronze Age site of Yanshi Shangcheng uncovered a series of depositional pits in the settlement’s walled elite palace compound that contained large quantities of foodstuffs: pottery and animal bones. Provisional interpretation was that it was a dedicated refuse dump and storage area for the palace. The features were named Dahuigou or ‘great ash trench’ (Henan Second Archaeological Team 2000), relating them to other smaller features such as ‘ash trenches’ and ‘ash pits’ that are common at sites in the region. By the early 2000s, archaeologists had reinterpreted the remains of Dahuigou as a network of ritual deposits (Institute of Archaeology 2002). Similar examples of this type of interpretive shift from refuse-to-ritual (or ritual-to-refuse) have occurred in European archaeology, highlighting difficulties in interpretation (e.g. Hamerow 2006; Morris and Jervis 2011).
