David N. Keightley

David N. Keightley was Professor Emeritus of History and East Asian Languages at the University of California, Berkeley, where he served as Chair of the Center for Chinese Studies (1988-90), Chair of the History Department (1992-94), and Interim Director of the East Asian Library (1999-2000). He was a MacArthur Fellow from 1986-1991. Keightley studied the origins of Chinese civilization in the Neolithic and early Bronze Ages, employing archaeological and inscriptional evidence, including oracle bone inscriptions, the earliest known corpus of written texts in East Asia. He had a particular interest in the formation of political and religious culture--ancestor worship, divination, and the development of bureaucracy--viewed in cross-cultural perspective. He had a general interest in the origins of civilization in China (ca. 5000-1000 B.C.), contrasted with the origins of seminal civilizations elsewhere, informs his main research into the oracle-bone inscriptions of the Late Shang dynasty (ca. 1250-1000 B.C.), the earliest corpus of written texts yet know in East Asia. These bronze-age inscriptions (known to the post-Shang world only after ca. A.D. 1899) throw much light on the environment, religious beliefs, and political culture of the first historical dynasty and on the genesis of models that were to significantly shape the later development of China's elite culture.