Min Li

Min Li serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her office is located in Fowler 322A on the UCLA campus in Los Angeles, California. She is an active researcher and educator in East Asian archaeology with contact email limin@humnet.ucla.edu.

Her educational background includes:

• Ph.D. in Archaeology, University of Michigan, 2008

Professor Li's research centers on Chinese archaeology, with a focus on the emergence of early civilizations in Neolithic and Bronze Age China. She also investigates maritime archaeology of the Asiatic Trade (13th-17th centuries), examining ceramic production and trade to document material culture transformations. Her methodological approach integrates landscape archaeology, systematic survey, archaeological ceramics analysis, remote sensing, and traditional studies of inscriptions and numismatics. She explores the social and cultural dynamics of early China through long-term landscape evolution.

She co-directs the Wen-Si River Basin archaeological survey project, a collaboration between UCLA and Chinese archaeologists. This project studies the archaeological landscape of the Qufu region, site of the ancient Lu city that hosted major ritual institutions in first-millennium BCE China. The research analyzes cultural resilience and symbolic potency of this landscape through successive sociopolitical transformations.