Dr. Li Min is a professor of prehistoric and Bronze Age Chinese archaeology at UCLA, who focuses on state formation, social memory, and story telling. He is also a key player in the excavation of Shimao, a site on the Yellow River in Northwest China that displays iconography from four thousand years ago that looks strikingly Mesoamerican. We discuss the context in which Shimao rose to become a major regional power, the heady interaction sphere between the city and the shamanic Steppe and Altai cultures that surrounded it, the persistence of imagery unchanged across thousands of years, and much more. Dig into Dr. Li Min’s work by reading up on Social Memory and State Formation in Early China, available for purchase in a way that supports the podcast: https://amzn.to/3s0UG6p

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PODCAST INFO: Anastasia completed her PhD studying bioelectricity at Columbia University. When not talking to brilliant people or making movies, she spends her time painting, reading, and guiding backcountry excursions. Shilo also did his PhD at Columbia studying the elastic properties of molecular water. When he's not in the film studio, he's exploring sound in music. They are both freelance professors at various universities.

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