Shang-era oracle bones are thought to have been unearthed occasionally by local farmers since as early as the Sui and Tang dynasties, … See more

The vast majority of the inscribed oracle bones were found at the Yinxu site in modern Anyang and date to the reigns of the last nine Shang … See more

Since divination was by heat or fire and most often on plastrons or scapulae, the terms pyromancy, plastromancy and scapulimancy are often used for this process. See more

Four inscribed bones have been found at Zhengzhou: three with numbers 310, 311, and 312 in the Hebu corpus, and one that has a single character (ㄓ), which also appears in late Shang inscriptions. HB 310, which contained two brief divinations, has been lost, but … See more

By the time of the establishment of the Institute of History and Philology by Fu Sinian at the Academia Sinica in 1928, the source of the oracle bones had been traced back to modern Xiaotun (小屯村) village at Anyang in Henan. Official archaeological … See more

Oracle bone inscriptions were published as they were discovered, in fascicles. Subsequently, many collections of inscriptions were also published. The following are the main collections.
• 殷墟文字甲編; Yinxu wenzi jiabian
• 殷 … See more

While the use of bones in divination has been practiced almost globally, divination involving fire or heat has generally been found only in Asia and the Asian-derived North American cultures. The use of heat to crack scapulae (pyro-scapulimancy) originated in … See more