Rowan Flad’s research focuses on the emergence and development of complex society during the late Neolithic period and the Bronze Age in China. He has conducted excavations at a salt production site in the eastern Sichuan Basin, a regional survey in the Chengdu region focusing on prehistoric settlement patterns and social evolution, and survey and excavations at late Neolithic and early Bronze Age in the Tao River Valley of southern Gansu. Current research and writing projects focus on several aspects of social complexity including: specialized production and technology, the anthropology of value, mortuary analysis, archaeological landscapes, interregional interaction, cultural transmission, animal and plant domestication, and bias in both media coverage of archaeological research and the practice of archaeology.
He has published extensively on archaeology in China and on theoretical and conceptual topics in many edited volumes and journals, including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Current Anthropology, The Holocene, Antiquity, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Journal of Field Archaeology, Asian Perspectives, Journal of East Asian Archaeology, Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Kaogu, and Nanfang Minzu Kaogu. Among his edited books are volumes on specialization in the series Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, and on the archaeology of ritual and economy in East Asia. He is the author of Salt Production and Social Hierarchy in Ancient China: An Archaeological Investigation of Specialization in China’s Three Gorges, published by Cambridge University Press in 2011, and Ancient Central China: Centers and Peripheries Along the Yangzi River, also by Cambridge in 2013. He is currently finishing English and Chinese project reports on The Chengdu Plain Archaeological Survey – Results from the 2005-2010 Seasons, and on the Tao River Archaeological Project.