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    Disciplines / Research questions

    History and archaeology

    9 research topics · 18 questions

    Did the Great Divergence occur before 1800 or after the Industrial Revolution?2 questions

    1. The early modern Great Divergence in living standards: building source-critically validated Asian wage and price series, dating and mapping the Europe–Asia gap before 1800, and assessing institutional explanations

    2. Dating the onset of modern economic growth: robust historical national accounts for China and the efflorescence-versus-sustained-growth question

    The correspondence between Erlitou culture and the Xia Dynasty1 questions

    1. The Absolute Chronology and Archaeological Identity of the Xia Dynasty: Reconciling Documentary Year-Counts with Radiocarbon Dating of the Late-Longshan, Xinzhai, and Erlitou Phases

    Relative weights of institutional, energy, and knowledge dissemination explanations in the Joseph Needham question1 questions

    1. The Needham puzzle in Lin's formulation: why imperial China's technological supremacy did not issue in an indigenous Scientific and Industrial Revolution, and whether the civil-service-examination incentive mechanism explains it

    Whether the Liangzhu society reached an early state-level form3 questions

    1. The political form of Liangzhu society (ca. 3300–2300 BC): early state or complex non-state society?

    2. Combining indicators of stratification and coercive power into a general operational method for distinguishing states from chiefdoms in the archaeological record

    3. Recognizing statehood from material remains in prehistoric East Asia: monumental construction versus coercive power at Hongshan and Liangzhu, and the continuity question to Erlitou

    Contributions of climate, epidemic, and institutional factors to the fall of the Roman Empire1 questions

    1. The unquantified exogenous background of the third-century crisis of the Roman Empire: the demographic and economic impact of the Antonine plague and the Plague of Cyprian, and the formation of the Alamannic, Frankish, and Saxon confederations

    Debate over whether Mendel's pea experiment data are too close to theoretical ratios2 questions

    1. Identifiability and distortion limits of repeat-and-report-best selection mechanisms behind the too-good fit of Mendel's data

    2. Detection and contamination-robust critical values for fake p-values in combined p-value meta-analysis

    Whether Ming and Qing China experienced Smithian growth before the Great Divergence2 questions

    1. Quantitative comparison of Smithian dynamics in late imperial China and early modern Europe

    2. Timing and magnitude of the Great Divergence before 1800: establishing the eighteenth-century level and trend of Yangzi Delta real income relative to north-western Europe

    The systemic nature of the Late Bronze Age collapse and multiple-cause models of a shared outcome2 questions

    1. Establishing and validating network-cascade models of the Late Bronze Age collapse against the archaeological record

    2. Causal attribution of the ~1198–1196 BC central Anatolian drought in the collapse of the Hittite Empire

    Origins of the Sanxingdui culture and its relationship with Bronze Age civilization in the Central Plains4 questions

    1. Absolute chronology and depositional characterization of the Sanxingdui sacrificial pits K3-K8, and the dynamics of the Sanxingdui sacrificial programme in early Bronze Age China

    2. Open questions on indigenous bronze production, metal provenance, and hoard deposition in the late second-millennium BC Hanzhong basin, China

    3. Provenance of the lead used in Shang Dynasty bronzes: the number, locations, and geological identities of the lead sources exploited within the Shang chronological range, and the unresolved relationship between highly radiogenic and common lead where silver cannot discriminate them

    4. Metal sources and production locus of ancient Chengdu Plains bronzes: the unlocated ore sources behind the local copper and lead signatures and the Sanxingdui provenance question

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