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From Living Turtle to Ancestral Medium: Protocols of Material Handling and Knowledge Keeping in the Shang Oracle Bone Divination
Mon, July 13, 9:15 to 10:45am, Edinburgh Futures Institute, 1.60English Abstract
This paper examines the ritual and material protocols surrounding burned turtle plastrons used in late Shang-period Chinese oracle bone divination dated 13th – 11th century B.C., arguing mainly that the procedures used in the late paleolithic and early bronze age scapulimancy in China constituted a more-than-human framework for producing and archiving divinatory knowledge. In the Shang world, turtle shells were considered not inert materials but living residues of a marine animal closely associated with cosmology, spirituality and divine communication with the ancestral and natural realm central to the royal institution. The divinatory process—from the procurement and preparation of plastrons (mainly Mauremys sinensis and Manouria emys) to the cracking rites and inscription carving—was governed by inherited instructions that linked human action to ancestral and spiritual actors. These protocols shaped who was permitted to handle shells, how shells were modified and processed for craving, and how divinatory cracks were interpreted as consequential signs.
The paper also intends to demonstrate how the current modern scientific approaches to oracle bones have introduced new, sometimes conflicting protocols. Archaeological conservation standards, museum handling rules, and digital imaging (including 2D, 2.5D, 3D techniques) practices constantly reframe these inscribed shells as complex data-bearing specimens rather than ritually potent objects. By situating turtle shells at the intersection of ritual obligation, material practice, and scientific procedure, this paper emphasizes how protocols—both past and present—can order human and more-than-human relations and mediate the authority of knowledge across cosmological and disciplinary boundaries.