This paper focuses on the work habits and motives of the Shang
recordkeepers who wrote the divination accounts discovered in 1991 in Pit 3
at Huayuanzhuang East. These scribes, who worked under the patronage of a
head of one of the princely households, collaborated with diviners sanctioned
under the same mandate and the two professional groups developed and
employed technologies to micromanage their workloads economically and
to do their jobs coherently and efficiently. The scribes who produced the
divination accounts on this homogenous and unified collection of shells and
bones demonstrated accurate divination recordkeeping and displayed a unique
competency and innovation in how these specialized records were designed,
written out, and formally presented. More crucially, the orientation of the
divination accounts indicates a control of the materials, attests to scribal
literacy, and implies that they were written to be read and consulted.