Who Were the Human Sacrifices in Shang China? Interview with Dr. Christina Cheung

Tides of History

Wondery / Patrick Wyman

Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 17 February 2022

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Human sacrifice is an ugly but essential topic in understanding the Shang Dynasty, but we know very little about precisely who these people were, where they came from, and what their lives were like prior to their deaths. Dr. Christina Cheung is a bioarchaeologist specializing in the study of stable isotopes, and she has produced some of the first work to shed light on who the sacrificial victims were. But that’s just one part of Dr. Cheung’s fascinating body of work, which extends all the way to Roman Britain and Neolithic France.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everybody, from Wondery, welcome to another episode of Tides of History.
0:13.1	I'm Patrick Weimann, thanks for joining me.
0:15.8	One of the things I've enjoyed most about diving into the more distant human past is
0:19.6	the incredible variety of new methods that scholars are using to study these periods.
0:24.8	Genetics is the one that comes to mind first, of course, in large part because the geneticists
0:28.0	have gotten really good at getting journalists to write about their findings, but ancient DNA
0:32.5	is just the tip of that particular iceberg.
0:35.4	The one that seems most promising to me in the long run is stable isotope analysis,
0:39.7	which can shed light on a whole bunch of different aspects of human experience, and in so
0:44.2	doing, bring us much closer to the actual lives of people who lived and died a very, very
0:49.0	long time ago.
0:50.6	To help us understand more about the potential of this exciting method, we have a fantastic
0:54.5	guest here today. Dr. Christina Chung is a specialist in stable isotope analysis.
0:59.0	She received her PhD from the University of British Columbia and is currently a post-doctoral
1:03.4	researcher at the Vraiya University Tide Brussels, where she is working on the European
1:07.8	Research Council's Lumiere Project.
1:10.2	In the last decade, she's worked on a wide variety of places and times, Roman Britain,
1:14.8	the earliest Neolithic of Iran, the Bronze Age of China, and more specifically the people
1:19.2	living at the Shang Capital of Yen Zhu, and now Neolithic France as well.
1:23.8	Dr. Chung, thank you so much for joining me.
1:25.6	Thanks for having me.
1:27.3	I'm very happy to be here.
	...

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