Ancient Chinese Lord's Bells Reveal How Dynasties 'Turned Off' Inconvenient Ancestral Rituals

Across the centuries, the living have always sought to manage their relationships with the dead — but a discovery in China suggests that Zhou dynasty elites understood this management with unusual precision. Archaeologists examining the tomb of Lord Qiu, a nobleman of the state of Zeng, found evidence that ceremonial bells buried with him were deliberately tampered with after his interment, not out of vandalism, but out of political calculation. When former enemies became allies, the ancestral war-invocations those bells sustained became liabilities, and someone made the considered decision to