About

Alice Yao is an Associate Professor with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She holds her B.A. from the University of Chicago and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Her research interest focuses on imperialism and the ways conquered subjects engage with concepts such as the “frontier” and the “tribal” in their everyday and non-quotidian (e.g., ritual) life. The geographic focus of her work is the region identified with the Dian polity or the “Southern Silk Road” in southwest China, a border zone of the Han Empire (202 BC – 200 AD). A primary goal of her work is to expand the exploration of empires beyond core-periphery models by asking how terms such as sovereignty and political legitimacy come to entangle imperial administrators and tribal leaders alike. Her approach brings archaeology as well as recorded local sources from the frontiers into comparative analysis with Chinese texts. She has completed a regional survey in the Lake Dian basin and is currently conducting field excavations at several Bronze Age and Han imperial settlements in this region. Her current research incorporates archaeobotanical, land use, and paleoenvironmental data to address the transformation of frontier landscapes. Upcoming writing projects are focused on how different ecologies, botanicals, and climates shaped imperial workings of geography and territoriality. She is also involved in collaborations such as Landcover6k, a PAGES working group interested in the conceptual and methodological conditions of the Anthropocene, and a project with Miranda Brown from the University of Michigan studying the genealogy of lactase persistence and its role in the making of personhood in post-racial US.

Research topics

• Geography
• Geology
• Computer Science
• Ecology
• Environmental science
• Data science
• Database
• Paleontology
• Physical geography
• Ancient history
• History
• Climatology
• Earth science
• Cartography
• Anthropology
• Oceanography
• Archaeology
• Environmental resource management

Selected publications

• From Disorder to Distinction: Lactose Intolerance and the Racialization of Digestion in Postwar Medicine (1950–1980)

  Comparative Studies in Society and History · 2026-04-22

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article examines how scientific research on lactose digestion from 1950 to 1980 became entangled in shifting discourses on race, heredity, and population. It traces how scientific framings of lactose digestion changed during this period—initially racialized as a disorder (lactase deficiency) affecting Black Americans, later reclassified as an ethnic trait, and ultimately reinterpreted as a biomarker of European ancestry. Drawing on medical research on “lactose science” and archival sources, this study explores how geneticists, medical researchers, and anthropologists jointly navigated the complexities of race and human variation in the postwar period. Using Peter Galison’s concept of trading zones , the paper traces how ethnicity and population emerged as strategic alternatives to race, facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration while preserving racialized assumptions about biological difference. The paper argues that despite efforts to align with UNESCO’s post-racial scientific agenda, research on lactose digestion came to produce a normative discourse around whiteness. In doing so, it raises a critical question: how did an ostensibly anti-racist science inadvertently revive older racial biologisms?

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Faunal exploitation in the first millennium BCE central Yunnan, China: evidence from Xueshan

  Journal of Archaeological Science Reports · 2026-02-28

  article
  PublisherDOI

• How to Assemble a Cross-Species History? Herders, Dams, Animal Younglings, and the Substance of Milk

  2025-04-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This critical essay delves into Elizabeth Grosz’s call to decenter human exceptionalism by exploring the prospects for constructing a cross-species history with a re-examination of dairying practices in the Neolithic to Iron Age Europe. One of the key developments associated with the adoption of dairying has long been assumed to be the emergence of a biological adaptation (the “lactase gene” or known as lactose tolerance) to facilitate the digestion of animal milk, which appears to be unique to humans. However, the evolutionary narrative surrounding this gene remains ambiguous, given the unclear origins of this genetic trait in the past. This chapter takes this impasse as an opportunity to ask “what is the substance of milk” beyond the logic of dietary and economic value and examines how the archaeological record can help challenge and undo evolutionary accounts of biological inheritance. Utilizing diverse sources, from prehistoric baby bottles to husbandry practices, the exploration delves into milking as an expression of caretaking and collaborative sexual reproduction, undoing the conventional bodily boundaries between species and constructions of kinship.

  PublisherDOI

• Unraveling the early human impacts on the ecosystem of Dianchi Lake: A 20,000-year diatom record from the southeastern Tibetan Plateau

  Quaternary Science Reviews · 2024-07-05 · 10 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• The Archaeology of Han China

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-12-12 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  The Han Dynasty, which ruled from 202 BCE to 212 CE, is often taken as a reference point and model for Chinese identity and tradition. Covering a geographical expanse comparable to that of the People's Republic of China, it is foundational to understanding Chinese culture and politics, past and present. This volume offers an up-to-date overview of the archaeology of the Han Empire. Alice Yao and Wengcheong Lam study the period via an interdisciplinary approach that combines textual and archaeological evidence. Exploring the dynamics of empire building in East Asia, Yao and Lam draw on recent archaeological discoveries to recast Western Han imperialism as a series of contingent material projects, including the organization of spatial orders, foodways, and the expansion of communication and ritual activities. They also demonstrate how the archaeology of everyday life offers insights into the impact of social change, and how people negotiated their identities and cultural affiliations as individuals and imperial subordinates.

  PublisherDOI

• The Imperial Network in Ancient China: The Foundation of Sinitic Empire in Southern East Asia by Maxim Korolkov (review)

  Asian perspectives · 2024-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: The Imperial Network in Ancient China: The Foundation of Sinitic Empire in Southern East Asia by Maxim Korolkov Alice Yao The Imperial Network in Ancient China: The Foundation of Sinitic Empire in Southern East Asia. Maxim Korolkov. New York: Routledge, 2022. 300+ pp., 24 figures, 5 tables, 3 appendices, glossary, index. Hardback US $136, ISBN 9780367654283; Paperback US $42, ISBN 9780367654290; eBook US $42, ISBN 9781003129394. At the outset of Seeing Like a State, James Scott (1998: 2) argued that "the premodern state was, in many crucial respects, partially blind." Given the lack of bureaucratic technologies to measure the productivity of its peoples and lands, it had little knowledge about its subjects and geography. Korolkov's book, The Imperial Network in Ancient China, revises this narrative by documenting the development of state spaces in one of the lesser known places in China at the southern peripheries of the Qin and Han empires. From a long historical perspective, regions south of the Yangzi River valley have conventionally been represented as a geographic backwater of the Chinese state, at least until the fourth to fifth century c.e. State integration, as Korolkov endeavors to show us in this book, should really be examined as an extended process, one beginning with the Sinitic territorial gamble from the third century b.c.e. to the first century c.e. This account of geopolitics in early China is a timely one, especially as recent excavations of Qin and Han imperial settlements in newly consolidated territories have yielded many bureaucratic documents written on wooden or bamboo boards and strips, most of which have only recently been transcribed. These not only show the state deploying writing technologies to register and control people and goods in faraway places, the corpus from Liye (the Qin county of Qianling), which represents the centerpiece of Korolkov's study, shows how the high cost incurred by institutional schemes to organize knowledge can also make the state a fragile enterprise (Yoffee 2019). These political developments are organized in chronological order beginning with the Qin conquest (230–214 b.c.e.) of the middle Yangzi watershed in chapter 4 to the Han expansion into Lingnan (a region encompassing the modern day provinces of Hunan, Guangdong, and Guangxi in China and northern Vietnam) after 110 b.c.e. in chapter 7. Throughout these chapters, Korolkov presents state spaces as part of an expanding and contracting spatial network linking different ecologies across a mountainous terrain. One of the many possible benefits of this structure is that the reader is compelled to engage with a geopolitics beyond a territorial model of bounded spaces. It is worth mentioning that the corpus recovered from the site of Liye in Hunan comprises something like seventeen thousand wooden strips and boards. Korolkov has undertaken the tremendous task of sorting through everything from household registration records to functionaries' memos to show how the organization of state spaces changed through time. He begins by tracing the evolution of the south as a space of interaction to one of confrontation. Reading chapters 2 and 3 together highlights the importance of differentiating an "old" from a "new" frontier and provides much welcomed nuance to the expansionist project. Chapter 4 uses excavated administrative records to illustrate the spatialization of this "new" southern frontier, in [End Page 129] particular the locations of lower level politicoadministrative units within Dongting Commandery. Korolkov not only fills in place names that are missing from the standard Chinese historiographies but also shows how the (under)staffing of this new Qin territory, recognized then as lying beyond the old frontier in "barbarian" territories, was filled by underqualified bureaucrats and plagued by poor morale. Chapter 5 discusses the coordination of county and district level affairs and the composition of frontier society, specifically the people who were relocated to these mountainous corridors by the state. Korolkov's analysis of the administrative registers reveals a high number of conscripts and convicts and a low number of civilian households whose identities were nevertheless manipulated by the state. We get a picture of Qin social engineering but at the same time of people absconding. Chapter 6 gives an interesting account of the local fiscal economy. Analysis...

  PublisherDOI

• Food production and agricultural systems on the southwestern frontier of the Han Empire: archaeobotanical remains from the 2016 excavation of Hebosuo, Yunnan

  Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences · 2023-05-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  Dian Basin in Yunnan province is an important center for both early agricultural production and centralized state formation. Settled agricultural villages are present in the province since at least the third millennium BC, and by the first millennium BC, the Dian Culture, a highly specialized bronze polity, flourished in the Dian Basin and surrounding area, until it was conquered by the Han in 109 BC. The increased deployment of flotation at recent archaeological excavations in Yunnan allowed the reconstruction of agricultural practices from the Neolithic to the early Bronze Age, documented at Baiyangcun, Haimenkou, and Xueshan among others. However, archaeobotanical evidence relating to the pivotal period right before and after the Han conquest have so far been lacking, with only limited written records about agricultural production in the Shiji by Sima Qian. Here we present for the first time direct archaeobotanical evidence relating to this transitional period as revealed by rich Han period deposits found during the 2016 excavation of Hebosuo, the largest Dian settlement investigated in Yunnan so far, dated by direct AMS on charred cereal grains and artefactual evidence as spanning from between 850 BC-220 AD. Following the Han conquest, the main components of the agricultural system did not undergo radical changes, but the weedy flora indicates a heavier reliance of wet-land rice systems, evidencing a higher level of water management or even irrigation practices, and the consequent intensification of the agricultural production. These findings on shifting agricultural regimes in Yunnan also contribute to current debates about the interplay between intensification, food risk, and ecology in times of political instability. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12520-023-01766-9.

  PublisherDOI

• The Imperial Network in Ancient China: The Foundation of Sinitic Empire in Southern East Asia . Maxim Korolkov. New York: Routledge, 2022. 300 + pp., 24 figures, 5 tables, 3 appendices, glossary, index.

  Asian perspectives · 2023-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Asian Perspectives, Vol. 63, No. 1 © 2024 by the University of Hawai‘i Press. The Imperial Network in Ancient China: The Foundation of Sinitic Empire in Southern East Asia. Maxim Korolkov. New York: Routledge, 2022. 300 + pp., 24 figures, 5 tables, 3 appendices, glossary, index. Reviewed by Alice YAO (ORCID: 0000-0002-9438-760X), University of Chicago At the outset of Seeing Like a State, James Scott (1998: 2) argued that “the premodern state was, in many crucial respects, partially blind.” Given the lack of bureaucratic technologies to measure the productivity of its peoples and lands, it had little knowledge about its subjects and geography. Korolkov’s book, The Imperial Network in Ancient China, revises this narrative by documenting the development of state spaces in one of the lesser known places in China at the southern peripheries of the Qin and Han empires. From a long historical perspective, regions south of the Yangzi River valley have conventionally been represented as a geographic backwater of the Chinese state, at least until the fourth to fifth century C.E. State integration, as Korolkov endeavors to show us in this book, should really be examined as an extended process, one beginning with the Sinitic territorial gamble from the third century B.C.E. to the first century C.E. This account of geopolitics in early China is a timely one, especially as recent excavations of Qin and Han imperial settlements in newly consolidated territories have yielded many bureaucratic documents written on wooden or bamboo boards and strips, most of which have only recently been transcribed. These not only show the state deploying writing technologies to register and control people and goods in faraway places, the corpus from Liye (the Qin county of Qianling), which represents the centerpiece of Korolkov’s study, shows how the high cost incurred by institutional schemes to organize knowledge can also make the state a fragile enterprise (Yoffee 2019). These political developments are organized in chronological order beginning with the Qin conquest (230-214 B.C.E.) of the middle Yangzi watershed in chapter 4 to the Han expansion into Lingnan (a region encompassing the modern day provinces of Hunan, Guangdong, and Guangxi in China and northern Vietnam) after 110 B.C.E. in chapter 7. Throughout these chapters, Korolkov presents state spaces as part of an expanding and contracting spatial network linking different ecologies across a mountainous terrain. One of the many possible benefits of this structure is that the reader is compelled to engage with a geopolitics beyond a territorial model of bounded spaces. It is worth mentioning that the corpus recovered from the site of Liye in Hunan comprises something like seventeen thousand wooden strips and boards. Korolkov has undertaken the tremendous task of sorting through everything from household registration records to functionaries’ memos to show how the organization of state spaces changed through time. He begins by tracing the evolution of the south as a space of interaction to one of confrontation. Reading chapters 2 and 3 together highlights the importance of differentiating an “old” from a “new” frontier and provides much welcomed nuance to the expansionist project. Chapter 4 uses excavated administrative records to illustrate the spatialization of this “new” southern frontier, in particular the locations of lower level politico-administrative units within Dongting Commandery. Korolkov not only fills in place names that are missing from the standard Chinese historiographies but also shows how the (under)staffing of this new Qin territory, recognized then as lying beyond the old frontier in ‘barbarian’ territories, was filled by underqualified bureaucrats and plagued by poor morale. Chapter 5 discusses the coordination of county and district level affairs and the composition of frontier society, specifically the people who were relocated to these mountainous corridors by the state. Korolkov’s analysis of the administrative registers reveal a high number of conscripts and convicts and a low number of civilian households whose identities were nevertheless manipulated by the state. We get a picture of Qin social engineering but at the same time of people absconding. Chapter 6 gives an interesting account of the local fiscal economy. Analysis of government rations from Liye surprisingly showed a diversified crop strategy, focused on...

  PublisherDOI

• A late 2nd/early 1st millennium BC interaction arc between Mainland Southeast Asia and Southwest China: Archaeometallurgical data from Hebosuo and Shangxihe, Yunnan

  Journal of Archaeological Science · 2022-05-26 · 14 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A 17,000-year multi-proxy study of the Indian Summer Monsoon from Lake Dian, Yunnan, China

  Palaeogeography Palaeoclimatology Palaeoecology · 2021-02-11 · 11 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Investigating The Relationship Between Environment And Social Organization In A Borderland Community

  NSF · $233k · 2014–2019

Frequent coauthors

• Zhilong Jiang

  Fudan University

  7 shared

• Aubrey L. Hillman

  5 shared

• Marco Madella

  Pompeu Fabra University

  3 shared

• Jan Kolář

  University College London

  3 shared

• Xiayun Xiao

  3 shared

• Thomas Oliver Pryce

  3 shared

• Cameron A. Petrie

  3 shared

• Wengcheong Lam

  Chinese University of Hong Kong

  3 shared

Labs

• Alice Yao Anthropology Research LabPI