Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project

Sima Qian felt able to give a year-by-year chronology back to the start of the Gonghe Regency in 841 BC, early in the Zhou dynasty.

In the 1920s, Gu Jiegang and other scholars of the Doubting Antiquity School noted that the earliest figures appeared latest in the literature, and suggested that the traditional history had accreted layers of myth.

The bones were finally traced back in 1928 to a site (now called Yinxu) near Anyang, north of the Yellow River in modern Henan province.

Moreover, from the sacrificial schedule recorded on the bones it was possible to reconstruct a sequence of Shang kings that closely matched the list given by Sima Qian.

[6] More recently the picture has been complicated by the discovery of advanced civilizations in Sichuan and the Yangtze valley, such as Sanxingdui and Wucheng, of which the traditional histories make no mention.

[8] In 1994, Song Jian, a state councillor for science, was impressed on a visit to Egypt by chronologies stretching back to the 3rd millennium BC.

[11] After lengthy review, the full report was sent to the publishers in 2019 and the offices of the Project were closed, with their materials sent to the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

The Project adopted (without acknowledgement) the proposal of the Korean scholar Pang Sunjoo (方善柱) that this referred to an annular solar eclipse at dawn that occurred in 899 BC.

This date had previously been proposed by David Pankenier, who had matched the above passages from the classics with the same astronomical events, but here it resulted from a thorough consideration of a broader range of evidence.

[22] For the late Shang, the oracle bones provide less detail than Zhou bronzes, routinely recording only the day in the sexagenary cycle.

[37] The project assigned all four phases to the Xia, identifying the establishment of the Shang dynasty with the building of the Yanshi walled city 6 km (3.7 mi) north-east of the Erlitou site.

[38] The time span of the Xia dynasty was taken from reign-lengths given in the Bamboo Annals and from a conjunction of five planets during the reign of Yu the Great recorded in later texts.

[38] The Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project concluded precise dates for accessions of rulers from Wu Ding, the Shang dynasty king whose reign produced the oldest known oracle bone records.

They argue that this forces archeological evidence into a framework of a single sequence of similar dominant states, as depicted in the histories and reflected in the title "Three Dynasties".

[45] A session of the Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies in 2002 was devoted to the preliminary report, where its methods were criticised by David Nivison, among others.