The Chinese school of archaeology

Abstract

In 1959, at a meeting reviewing the 'archaeological achievements of the past 10 years' in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the 'New China (1949-)', the leading archaeologist Yin Da (1906-1983), then director of the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), urged all the archaeologists in China "to cooperate fully, so that in the next three or five years, in the entire nation, we can build up a scientific and holistic system out of all cultural remains of all periods; that is to say, to build up a Marxist Chinese archaeological system" (Yin 1959: 123).This call had two keywords in it.One was 'Chinese'. Ever since the early twentieth century, growing nationalism had drum-beaten Chinese archaeologists to search for Chinese cultural origins (Liu & Chen 2001: 317). A particularly urgent matter for archaeologists of the 1950s was to dispel the notion of 'the western origin of Chinese culture' that was current among foreign and native archaeologists during theNationalist Era (1911-1949). To achieve this goal, it was imperative to undertake archaeological investigation systematically so as to prove the autochthonous origins and undisrupted development of Chinese civilisations. The second word, 'Marxist', reflects a process of cutting the umbilical cord of the reborn archaeology of the 'New China' from the 'bourgeois archaeology' of the 'Old China' and swaddling the discipline with the mantle of Marxist theories and models