The Ancestral Landscape: Time, Space, and Community in Late Shang China, Ca. 1200-1045 B.C (China Research Monographs,No 53)

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Summary: What the oracle bones tell us about the Shang world
Review: Keightley, one of the top Western scholars in this field, has produced a must-read with this exploration of everything the oracle bone divination contents can tell us about the lives and environment of the Shang world, including agriculture, time and the calendar, the Shang territory, capital and its environs, foreign relations, and religious life. On each topic, Keightley presents phrases found in the oracle bone inscriptions, directly translated graph for graph into modern Chinese characters, then presents his translation into English, and a discussion. His style is lucid, his scholarship keen. There are eight figures with rubbings of actual oracle bones in the rear, but other than this, all the contents of the divinations are presented only in modern, traditional graphs, which is a bit disappointing for those like me who would very much like to see the oracle bone versions of the graphs for each phrase. Nevertheless, highly recommended.