Robert E. Murowchick

Areas of Expertise

Early metallurgy in China and Southeast Asia; archaeological remote sensing; aerial and satellite imagery; the relationship among politics, nationalism, and archaeological research

About Professor Murowchick

Prof. Murowchick is Associate Director of BU’s Center for the Study of Asia (BUCSA), Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies; Director of AsianArc: BU’s Asian Cultural Heritage Research Initiative (formerly the International Center for East Asian Archaeology and Cultural History, or ICEAACH); and Adjunct Associate Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology at Boston University. He is also an Associate in East Asian Archaeology at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

Prof. Murowchick previously served as Associate Director of Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning from 1990-1992, and then concurrently as Associate Director of Harvard’s John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research and of its Title VI National Resource Center for East Asian Studies from 1992-1996. He is active with many Asian Studies-related public outreach efforts with Primary Source, NCTA (the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia), the Archaeological Institute of America, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Boston Children’s Museum, and many other institutions.

Prof. Murowchick’s principal research interests include the development of early metallurgy in China and Southeast Asia, archaeological remote sensing (particularly the use of aerial and satellite imagery), and the relationship among politics, nationalism, and archaeological research, and cultural heritage preservation and the international trade in antiquities. From 1991-2004, he served as Co-Investigator and then as Co-Principal Investigator of the collaborative archaeological field program Investigations into Early Shang Civilization, between the Peabody Museum (Harvard University) and the Institute of Archaeology (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing). This project sought to trace the origins of Shang civilization through an interdisciplinary program of geological testing and landscape reconstruction, geophysical remote sensing, and archaeological excavation focused on the region of Shangqiu County in eastern Henan Province, China. Critical to the success of this project was the close collaboration of a number of specialists from the University of Minnesota-Duluth, University of British Columbia, University of Missouri-St. Louis, University of Toronto, MIT, and the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, among others.  Murowchick’s current collaborative work focuses on investigations of non-ferrous metallurgy in southwest China, the history of Chinese bronze studies, and the development of the ARC/Base Project, a comprehensive, multilingual web-based bibliographic database of Asian archaeology and related fields.

Courses

• AR 100 Great Discoveries in Archaeology
• AR 101 Introduction to Archaeology
• AR 240 The Archaeology of Ancient China
• AR 390/790 The Archaeology of Southeast Asia
• AR 795 Politics, Nationalism, and Archaeology

Select Publications

• “Historical Archaeology (Qin and Han).” In Oxford Bibliographies in Chinese Studies. Ed. Tim Wright. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
• (With Angela Sheng, and Kaoru Ueda). “Dr. Irene Lee Good (April 24 1958 – February 3 2013): An Appreciation.” In Dr. Berit Hildebrandt and Carole Gillis (eds.), Silk: Trade and Exchange along the Silk Roads between Rome and China in Antiquity. Ancient Textiles Series 29. Oxford: Oxbow Books, pp 124-130, 2017.
• (With David J. Cohen). “Early Complex Societies in Northern China,” in Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn (eds.), The Cambridge World Prehistory. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 772-796, 2014.