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For the first half of the first millennium Bc, the most notable find of elite artifacts in the Chengdu Plain is a pair of hoards of bronzes found at Zhuwajie in Pengxian (now Pengzhou City) in 1959 and 1980. The present paper is a comprehensive study examining and discussing the circumstances and the date of the burials, the styles and the dates of the bronzes, and their casting technology and likely place of manufacture. It also situates the Zhuwajie bronzes in the context of the bronze cultures in the Chengdu Plain as well as the general historical background of the Western Zhou period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Baoduncun Culture, named after prehistoric walled settlements in the Chengdu Plain, was a regional archaeological culture distributed in the western part of the Sichuan Basin along the upper reaches of the Yangzi River and centered in the Chengdu Plain. Dating from the Late Neolithic (or Chalcolithic) and contemporaneous with the Long-shan cultures of northern China, its recent discovery constitutes a major achievement in the clarification of the pre-Qin archaeological sequences in southwestern China. The Baoduncun Culture, like the Sanxingdui Culture that followed it, is highly instructive demonstrating the special status that the Sichuan Basin, particularly its western portion, holds as a place of origin and a center of development of ancient civilization in the upper Yangzi River valley. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An idiosyncratic Bronze Age culture, thought to be roughly contemporaneous with the Late Shang (ca. 1300–1050 BC) in the Yellow River Basin, has recently been discovered in the Chengdu Plain. The large walled settlement at the type site of Sanxingdui, Guanghan (Sichuan) and its highly developed bronze and jade manufacturing traditions indicate the presence of state-level civilization. This article attempts to clarify some of the relationships to the Sanxingdui culture to earlier, contemporaneous, and later archaeological cultures in the surrounding areas. Objects from the so-called "sacrificial pits" at Sanxingdui and at the slightly later site of Jinsha, Chengdu (Sichuan) are compared to archaeological finds from other parts of China, revealing significant connections to Neolithic and Early Bronze Age cultures along the Middle and Lower Yangzi as well as in the Central Plain, and showing that, for all its unusual features, Bronze Age Sichuan was by no means isolated in the cultural interaction sphere of mainland East Asia. Moreover, it can now be shown that Sanxingdui traits survived in later archaeological contexts, mainly in Southwest China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sanxingdui site is a Neolithic and early Bronze Age site in the Chengdu Plain in Sichuan Province, southwest China. Over the years, as archaeological fieldwork at the site has progressed, the understanding of the site and its culture has changed gradually. This article discusses the stratigraphy, pottery typology, periodization, and absolute dating of Sanxingdui, aiming to evaluate major periodization schemes and different definitions of the Sanxingdui Culture, which the site typifies. It is argued that the Sanxingdui Culture encompasses Phase II through Phase IV of the four-phase periodization scheme for the Sanxingdui site and that the earliest remains at the Shi'erqiao site in nearby Chengdu, contemporary with the Phase IV remains at Sanxingdui, should be included in the spatial and temporal dimensions of the Sanxingdui Culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]