Min Li
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2008
Office: Fowler A322-B
Fax:
310-206-4723
E-mail:
limin@humnet.ucla.edu
Mailing Address:
308 Charles E Young Dr. North
A210 Fowler Building/Box 951510
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1510
UCLA Appointments
Department of Asian Languages and Cultures (ALC) and the Archaeology IDP
Research Interests
Social archaeology and cultural history of continental East Asia, focusing on emergence early civilizations in Neolithic and Bronze Age China. Historical anthropology, material culture, and conceptions of the past in early modern China. Landscape archaeology, integrating systematic survey, analysis of archaeological ceramics, remote sensing imagery, with traditional studies of stone inscriptions and numismatics.
Research Summary
Professor Li is interested in the development of social complexity and state formation in late Neolithic and early Bronze Age China and the archaeological studies of material culture in early global encounter and colonization. These two seemingly unrelated fields are intricately connected in his theoretical concern for the dynamic interactions between large social systems, i.e.state and empires, and local societies far removed from the centers of political authority--how material mediations across diverse social formations transformed the societies involved and created relationships of dependency.
His research on early Bronze Age China investigates the complex entanglement resulting from the Shang state expansion to the culturally diverse coastal region of Shandong in the late second millennium BC. His research reveals how aspects of material, social and cultural worlds converge in human interactions with animals, particularly in food use and religious communication. Li uses faunal analysis as the primary research tool, supplemented with evidence from ceramics and spatial contexts, to reconstruct the social settings of the animal use.
Li's research in the archaeology of the early modern era focuses on the movement of commodities, particular trade porcelain, in Southeast Asia and later in trans-Pacific trade. The study of material culture documents the dramatic social and economic changes that occurred as the communities that were once part of the traditional Asiatic trade network became increasingly incorporated into a global economy. The archaeological study aims to understand the profound social consequences of early global encounter for those “people without history.”
Forthcoming research project, “Archaeology of the Confucian Landscape", a landscape archaeology project of the Wen-Si River Valley in Shandong.
Courses Taught or Scheduled: Graduate Core Seminar (201B) in Anthropological Archaeology; Fragments of Globalization: The Archaeology of Early Global Trade and Piracy; Material Culture of China; Archaeological Landscapes of East Asia; Humans and (Other) Animals in Early China; Archaeology of Neolithic and Early Bronze Age China; & Paradigms and Practice of Chinese Archaeology
Edit This Page