ORACLE BONES: A Journey Between China's Past and Present, by Peter Hessler. HarperCollins, 2006, 491 pp., $26.95 (cloth)

Beside their obvious antiquity, why should heaps of cattle shoulder-blades and turtle shells dating from the 13th and 14th centuries B.C. be of such immense importance to today's archaeologists? The answer, as we discover in Peter Hessler's eponymously named "Oracle Bones," is that the prophecies incised onto their surfaces represent examples of East Asia's earliest writing forms.

A free-lancer whose essays on China have appeared in the New Yorker, National Geographic and in anthologies like "The Best American Travel Writing," Hessler likes to scope out the human angle, even when he is exploring the sediments of history. His approach to collecting information about the Chinese is simple: He lives among them, socializing, eating with them, speaking their language, learning as he befriends them.

History and the great political movements are always there in the background of Hessler's new book, but his primary interest is in the people he encounters. His method for analyzing this unwieldy country is part reportage, travelogue and anthropology. In the process, Hessler meets a great many people, from obdurate officials, a banned woman novelist, to an old man living in a hutong, or courtyard house, the victim of a compulsory purchase order.