Paper for circulation to participants in the workshop
“New Perspectives on the Study of Chinese Culture and Society”
Princeton, March 24-26, 2003.
The Current State of Chinese Archaeology
Lothar von Falkenhausen
UCLA
Note to Workshop Participants:
My role at the workshop as I understand it would have been to
present the potential contributions of archaeology to the study
of Chinese culture and society. Using pieces from my new book
manuscript and from lecture manuscripts, I have produced a short
and rather general paper (still unfootnoted, due to time
pressures) that I hope will contribute in some measure to your
discussion. I would have greatly enjoyed participating in
person, and I regret that my obligations at Kyôto University
are preventing me from attending. If I can provide further
information during the workshop, please contact me at
lothar@humnet.ucla.edu. My office telephone number in Kyôto
is –81-75-753-2856.
I wish you every success for this very important workshop.
L. v. F.
For us today, it has become difficult to imagine the
extent to which archaeology once was little more than a dry
exercise in the description and classification of artifacts
with little other purpose than establishing their chronology.
In Western countries as well as in Japan, the discipline has
1
become transformed since the 1950s as a result of very welcome
efforts to make the results of these painstaking, but narrow
efforts speak to broader underlying issues, such as subsistence,
environmental adaptation, living conditions, cultural and
religious customs, social relations, and economic interaction.
As a result, archaeology has become considerably more
interesting--both to the general public and to its own
practitioners--and it has also become more relevant to other
fields of scholarship.
The discipline’s reorientation has
undoubtedly been facilitated, if not indeed necessitated, by
the tremendous increase in the amount of evidence that has been
generated over the course of the twentieth century.
Another
enabling factor has been a welcome reorientation of the
mainstream historical discipline, which is now far more ready
than a half-century ago to focus, not on events but on situations
and processes; not on individuals but on social groups; not on
states but on cultures.
Archaeology is well equipped to
contribute to historical inquiry thus defined.
In China, historical circumstances have delayed this
development.
To begin with, modern archaeology was introduced
to China relatively late--scientific excavation only started
in the 1920s, and it did not begin to proceed on a large scale
until after 1950, following an interruption of more than a
decade due to war.
The main agenda of archaeological activity
2
in China ever since has been the construction of a valid
chronological framework using the two core methods of
archaeology: stratigraphic excavation and typological
seriation.
This task, unglamorous as it is, is the conditio
sine qua non for the discussion of any other topic, and it must
be brought to a certain level of completion before any widening
of intellectual perspectives can occur.
Today, such
elementary chronology-building still continues in some parts
of China, but in the areas considered central to the development
of the country’s early civilization--the Yellow River Basin,
the Shandong peninsula, the Huai River Basin, and the Middle
and Lower Yangzi Basin--usable archaeological chronologies
have been in place since the 1990s.
In spite of some justified
dissatisfaction with the overly orthodox applications of
Montelian typology on which these chronologies are based, there
can be no doubt that they are relatively secure.
Chinese
archaeologists are therefore now in a position to turn away from
the perpetual contemplation of the Shape of Time and toward the
issues of substance that have long interested their colleagues
elsewhere.
Such a transition is currently ongoing.
This intellectual transition has coincided with a
fundamental change in the external conditions under which
archaeological research takes place in China--changes due to
the country’s economic modernization.
3
From the 1950s through
the 1970s, the Chinese government was using archaeology for
propaganda purposes, both within the country as a means of
“proving” the tenets of Marxism, and abroad in order to create
goodwill through spectacular archaeological exhibitions.
The
“opening” of China since the late 1970s has turned governmental
attention to different educational goals and new means of
promoting the country’s image.
As a result, government
interest in archaeological work has dwindled, and so has
government funding.
Archaeological institutions have come to
depend critically on revenues from whatever exhibitions they
may able to launch abroad--exhibitions that have assumed an ever
more blatantly commercial character--and on income from salvage
excavations that are legally mandated before public
construction can proceed at an area known to be an
archaeological site.
For many once-flourishing institutions,
such salvage work has become not only the only way to conduct
fieldwork, but indeed the only reason for their continued
existence.
Even China’s premier research institution, the
Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences, has seen itself forced to participate (albeit
fortunately not to the exclusion of other activities) in salvage
work.
While no one disputes the necessity of rescuing sites
in danger of being destroyed, especially under the current
conditions of rapid modernization, it is also true that the time
4
constraints under which such work is conducted, as well as the
arbitrary definition of its object of research, make it
ill-suited to the systematic investigation of wider issues of
interest to the historical discipline at large.
This was less
of a problem as long as piecing together chronological sequences
was still the prevalent objective.
Historians of China universally appreciate the
usefulness of archaeological work as a purveyor of inscribed
material that enrich the preserved corpus of written sources.
Most will admit, moreover, that non-textual archaeological data,
as well, can furnish a means for checking the correctness of
the transmitted texts, and that frequently they can provide
information on a wide variety of subjects on which written
materials are lacking or insufficient.
Viewed in this way,
archaeology has functioned as an extension of text-based
historiography into the non-textual realm.
Chinese
archaeologists are trained as historians, and it is often
observed that many of them place a higher value on the mastery
of textual history than on perfectioning their field techniques.
Thus, to the extent that archaeologists have themselves
contributed to the study of historically contextualized
discoveries (such as the Qin Terracotta Army)--rather than just
offering them up to textual historians for further study--they
have worked on them as historians.
5
There is nothing wrong in this.
But what I would like
to emphasize here is the ability of archaeologists to contribute
to the study of history as archaeologists.
By embedding their
approaches to Chinese data in theories and generalizations
generated in the Social Sciences at large--generalizations that
are based in cross-cultural comparison and claim validity
beyond the confines of a single culture area--anthropologically
oriented archaeologists are equipped to view the cultural
realities of ancient China in a perspective that, while not
denying the validity of the textual record, puts it aside for
the moment.
In this way, they can reconstruct historical
developments based on material data alone--narratives that,
while they may complement and enrich text-based ones (and should
certainly be integrated with them in a secondary step of
analysis), are not a priori determined by the set agenda of
locally-focused text-based scholarship.
It is as a purveyor
of such alternative knowledge that the archaeological
discipline can make its most useful, and potentially most
exciting, contribution to historical inquiry at large.
But in order to be able to do this, archaeology needs
a new kind of data, as well as a new attitude toward data.
Rather
than dealing with individual sites to be assigned to
archaeological cultures, and with artifacts to be fitted into
typological lineages, the researcher now must assemble bodies
6
of data that are amenable to quantification--datasets that
comprise many different and interrelated kinds of information,
from site features to artifacts to geological and environmental
evidence.
Their gathering, processing, and analysis demands
the use of advanced methods of information management.
The
resulting large datasets will enable one to extract meaningful
statistical data, which are the precondition to the application
of social-science methods.
This is hard work--at least as hard
as the piecing-together of the chronological sequences that has
dominated Chinese archaeology so far.
Yet only if it is done
can excavated non-textual evidence unfold its full potential
and function as a source of information that is
epistemologically independent from text-based historiography.
Unfortunately, virtually none of the bodies of Chinese
archaeological data so far reported were generated with the
intention of their being either comprehensive or representative
in a statistical sense.
Herein lies the most fundamental
obstacle to the study of issues of greater historiographical
interest with the archaeological data now available; as a result,
the long-overdue intellectual reorientation of Chinese
archaeology has been slowed.
Sometimes one is tempted to do
simple statistical calculations based on such
non-representative samples, but the results of such efforts are
unreliable and tend to be misleading.
7
This problem is by no
means limited to China, but it is particularly severe there due
to the country’s forty-year long isolation (1949-ca. 1990) from
the international developments of the archaeological
discipline, which coincided with the period during which the
use of statistically-based methods in archaeology was pioneered
and gradually became the norm in other parts of the world.
That such a situation continues today is also in part
an outgrowth of the pressures of salvage archaeology.
Faced
with the need to salvage a site threatened with destruction,
Chinese archaeologists--again like many of their colleagues in
other parts of the world--are understandably prone to dig
wherever they expect to make spectacular finds, rather than
applying scientific sampling strategies that, while yielding
data that are representative and can speak to questions of
interest to social scientists and historians, might miss some
“beautiful things.”
While such data-collecting strategies
potentially enrich the stock of objects available for
international exhibitions, they are not conducive to
methodologically innovative research on larger historical
questions.
One result of this situation is the often remarked-upon
fact that the lion’s share of available archaeological data from
China comes from tombs, with a relative lack of information on
other kinds of sites, especially settlements.
8
Lately, this
imbalance has begun to be redressed in part, but the scarcity
of settlement data--already bemoaned by K.C. Chang almost a
half-century ago--remains a severe liability to the
archaeological study of broader historical topics.
The
problem is not that settlements are unknown: Xu Hong’s excellent
recent synthesis of ancient cities in China presents 428 walled
settlements from the Eastern Zhou period alone, plus 39 from
the earlier part of the Bronze Age and some 40 from the Neolithic
period.
But archaeological work at these cities has been
extremely limited, and almost nowhere does the available
information allow meaningful inferences on the lifeways and
social interactions of their inhabitants.
Moreover, although
there has been no lack of areal surveys in many parts of China,
these were without exception unsystematic, haphazard, and
non-representative, more prone to mislead than to inform the
reader as to the settlement history of an area; their only
conceivable usefulness lay in providing material for piecing
together local ceramic sequences and tracing the spatial extent
of archaeological cultures.
By contrast, nothing is known
about the pattern of settlement distribution over the cultural
landscape of ancient China, and Xu Hong’s figures very likely
represent but a small fraction of the city sites actually in
existence.
Even more regrettably, practically nothing is
known about the surrounding non-urban settlements and about
9
their spatial, economic, and social relationships to cities.
Of course, such sites certainly exist in great numbers, and they
undoubtedly preserve clues to entire dimensions of social life
on which written documentation is lacking.
But the recovery
of this information remains an urgent desideratum.
A welcome opportunity to engage in the systematic
data-gathering that is necessary to ameliorate this situation
has recently arisen with the launching of international
collaboration projects.
Once strictly forbidden, such
ventures were first approved in the early 1990s after long and
assiduous lobbying by American, European, and Japanese
institutions.
Gratifyingly, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation
took a lead in providing the funding for several of these
projects from the very beginning.
We can now look back on almost
a decade of experience with such collaborations.
Even though
the results in most cases have not been fully published, a great
deal of important work has been done.
With the right
counterparts, such projects can bring about very significant
new departures in research, and they can also contribute to the
transfer of advanced concepts and techniques that will serve
to modernize Chinese archaeological practice both physically
and intellectually.
I have myself been involved on the margins
of such collaborations since the beginning, and I launched my
own, still ongoing project in 1999.
10
Several, though by no means all of these new projects
have taken the form of settlement-pattern surveys.
By
gathering large, statistically significant datasets through
systematic documentation of archaeological sites still
discernible on the ground, they aim at reconstructing the
spatial configuration and development through time of the human
occupation of a particular geographical area.
In the first
place, such research traces the history of a population’s
adaptation to the ecological conditions and its exploitation
of the natural resources of a given area, but the settlement
pattern also reflects modes of social hierarchy, political
dominance, and economic interaction, as well as demographic
developments.
Pioneered by Gordon Willey in the Virú Valley
of Perú during the 1940s, this approach has been used to great
effect in many parts of the world.
K. C. Chang, who, in addition
to being the most important exponent of Chinese archaeology in
the West, was also a leading theoretician of settlement
archaeology, early pointed out its potential importance to
China and applied it in fieldwork in Taiwan during the 1970s.
In Mainland China since the mid-1990s, even though the decision
to undertake such surveys may in some cases have been a strategic
one--surface surveys are relatively cheap and less politically
sensitive than full-scale excavation projects--projects of
this sort happen to yield just the kind of scientific data now
11
needed to bring about further progress in archaeological
research in China.
They promise to make a major impact on
archaeological practices in the country.
Below, I shall describe very briefly a few of the projects
involving Western institutions that I have been aware of.
As
joint projects involving Han and later periods often involve
the conservation and study of extant monuments and thus tend
to be dominated by approaches and priorities different from
those of field archaeology, I will here limit myself to the
pre-Imperial era.
The Shangqiu Project. The first full-scale archaeological
cooperation project in China since the end of the Cultural
Revolution (and only the second after 1949, after a disastrous
cooperation with North Korea in the early 1960s) was launched
in 1992 by the Institute of Archaeology, CASS, and the Peabody
Museum at Harvard University, with Zhang Changshou on the
Chinese side and the late K. C. Chang on the American side serving
as co-PIs. The excavators were hoping to find the “Great City
Shang,” the paramount ritual center of the Shang dynasty, which
some historical sources locate near Shangqiu in eastern Henan.
They. Although this part of the Yellow River Basin is known
to have been one of the key zones of ancient cultural development
in north China, it had previously been almost unexplored
archaeologically; for the Yellow River has deposited thick
accumulations of loess soil, and conventional wisdom had it that
sites had either been destroyed by flooding or buried too deeply
to be recoverable. The first task of the Project was therefore
to assemble basic data from the research area and to determine
the feasibility of archaeological work there.
Coming from a variety of disciplines, participants in
the Project simultaneously adopted a number of different
methodologies: use of satellite and aereal images (both current
and from earlier decades) to uncover irregularities in
landforms that might indicate the presence of archaeological
sites; geomorphological coring to determine the history of
landform development in this area during historical times;
conventional-type survey and excavation on small hills locally
12
known as gudui (actually levées bordering ancient courses of
the Yellow River) to clarify the cultural sequence in this area;
and geophysical methods such as ground-penetrating radar and
magnetometer research to determine the location of large-scale
structures underground without excavation. In the course of
the research, against earlier predictions, many ancient
settlements were located, both on the gudui and in the
floodplain around them. Through assiduous coring, Jing
Zhichun--a geoarchaeologist who wrote his dissertation under
the auspices of the project--was able to determine, first of
all, that the deposition of Yellow River mud, although ten to
twelve meters thick in places, had occurred not gradually over
a long time, as had been thought, but relatively suddenly around
1000 years ago, during the Song dynasty (the exact reasons still
await elucidation). Consequently, early sites buried
underneath may well be better-preserved than had been
originally assumed.
Through the excavation of several Late Neolithic and
Early Bronze Age sites, the Project was able to define the
culture sequence in this area during the time immediately
preceding the rise of Shang royal power and afterward, thus
gaining a glimpse into the material environment within which
the “Great City Shang” may have arisen. Moreover, extensive
above-ground survey was able to locate--even at a depth of
several meters below the present surface--the walls of the
Eastern Zhou capital of Song, a local polity whose rulers were
descended from the Shang kings. Coring and a small test
excavation produced even earlier remains in strata below those
of the Song city, including Early Shang pottery. While it seems
attractive, as well as logical, to assume that the Song capital
was built on the very site of the “Great City Shang,” the work
done so far is insufficient to establish this with certainty.
Funding was unexpectedly discontinued at the very moment when
excavation could have begun to clarify the situation.
At its inception, the Shangqiu Project was criticized
for allegedly being motivated by the intention to verify a
historical account, or indeed one particular scholar’s view of
early Shang history. But rather than being narrowly limited
to a search for the “Great City Shang,” the Project envisaged
the clarification of the settlement history of an entire,
previously unexplored region and its position in the wider
political landscape of Late Neolithic and Bronze Age China.
Moreover, it addressed the question of how the archaeological
cultures in this area during the period of initial state
formation related to one another, with a view of clarifying
whether the “Shang” culture of the Bronze Age had emerged
without a break from the Late Neolithic culture sequences of
the Shangqiu area, or whether it had imposed itself from the
13
outside. Moreover, comparisons with Neolithic and Early
Bronze Age remains from neighboring areas were undertaken (most
systematically in David Cohen’s dissertation) in order to throw
new light on the much-debated question of whether the Shang
ruling group originated in the northern or the eastern part of
the Yellow River system. Extant texts are contradictory on this
point. Of course, archaeological materials can only hint at
a possible solution to this historiographical question; but at
least, the Project has generated archaeological data on the
basis of which it can now be discussed at an unprecedented level
of sophistication.
Likewise, the search for the “Great City Shang,” rather
than than aiming merely to identify one particular Shang capital,
amounted to a test of various competing hypotheses as to the
nature of Shang kingship and the territorial structure of the
Shang state. Did the Shang have one stable ritual center (the
“Great City Shang”) in addition to its well-known “revolving
capitals” (such as the famous Yinxu near Anyang, in northern
Henan)? Do remains such as the Anyang palaces and tombs
constitute the supreme manifestation of Shang culture, or were
they secondary to those of a major center? These are issues
that must be resolved not only in order to understand Shang
history in a particular sense, but also in order to place it
appropriately in historical and anthropological comparisons of
early kingdoms across cultural boundaries. So far, these
questions are still pending, but the project, if restarted, may
well provide clear answers.
As in many cases, much of the initial skepticism toward
the Shangqiu project was due less to real worries about its
feasibility, than to the fact that its research design directly
confronted the historiographical views then dominant in
China--not in a hostile way but as hypotheses that could be
verified or falsified by new and different kinds of data.
Detractors of the Project may well have been motivated by a fear
that these new data might upset their cherished preconceptions.
Indeed, archaeology’s ability to proffer genuinely new
evidence--which should be seen as its greatest strength--is
easily perceived as a threat by those who believe that they are
already in possession of the truth.
Arguably the most important immediate contribution of
the Shangqiu Project was the introduction to China of
sophisticated modern methods of geoarchaeological research and
remote sensing. This very promising approach to data recovery,
which had been little valued as long as piecemeal
chronology-building was the principal objective of
archaeological research. Thanks to the Shangqiu experiences,
the use of coring, magnetometer survey, and ground-penetrating
radar has become routine in archaeological projects, at least
14
those launched by the CASS. Such techniques, when used with
the appropriate research designs, not only enable great economy
of labor in excavation, but facilitate generating the
statistically representative datasets needed in order to
address wider historical issues.
The Anyang Project. Starting in 1998, the Institute of
Archaeology, CASS, applied the new prospecting methods
introduced by the Shangqiu Project in another collaborative
project at the final Shang capital at Anyang--the very place
where the Institute of History and Philology of the Academia
Sinica had undertaken China’s first large-scale modern
archaeological field project in 1928-1937. Ever since 1950
(except for the Cultural Revolution period), the Institute of
Archaeology had been conducting research excavations
continuously at this location, making many important
discoveries. Being not only probably the most prestigious, but
also the most thoroughly-explored archaeological site in China,
Anyang was an ideal location for testing the extent to which
the new prospection methods could improve on the results of more
traditional archaeological procedures.
The main protagonists of the project, Tang Jigen, the
director of the Anyang Work Station of the Institute of
Archaeology, and Jing Zhichun (then University of Minnesota,
now University of British Columbia) were both veterans of the
Shangqiu project. They put the combination of techniques that
had proved to be so useful at Shangqiu to use in a systematic,
large-scale surface survey covering a large area within 20 km
or so around the core area of Yinxu. Unlike Shangqiu, the
presence of a site in this part of the Yellow River Basin is
often indicated above ground by sherd scatters, soil
discolorations, or other features. Although parts of the
original land surfaces have been destroyed over the course of
time, the resulting sample of sites is statistically
representative. The Project was able for the first time to
establish the settlement context of the Anyang core. Even
without extensive excavation, it has become possible to say
something about the density of occupation of the area
surrounding the ancient capital, the physical size of villages,
and the development of the settlement pattern through time.
Initial insights into natural-resource procurement patterns
and arteries of traffic were also obtained. Rather than as an
isolated place of high cultural achievement, Anyang has started
to appear as part of a cultural landscape--an environment
modified systematically to suit the exigences of the state and
the manifestation of royal power during the formative period
of China’s dynastic history. This constitutes a dramatic
improvement on earlier understandings.
15
The most important discovery made in the course of this
survey was the site of a large walled city across the Huan river
from the Yinxu core. Dating to a period slightly preceding the
Late Shang occupation sites and cemeteries at Yinxu, this “Shang
City to the North of the Huan River” (Huanbei Shangcheng) is
hypothesized to have been a Shang capital during the period
between Zhengzhou and Yinxu. Subsequent to its discovery, the
Institute of Archaeology has started large-scale excavations
there, leading to the discovery of what is so far the largest
palace-building foundation from the Chinese Bronze Age--larger
than any at Yinxu. Systematic coring in the central part of
the site has revealed that this is only one of a whole group
of similar-sized palaces, changing completely our picture of
the layout, appearance, and degree of opulence of an early
Bronze Age city.
It would of course be unfair to blame the dedicated older
archaeologists who spent their lives excavating at Anyang under
often very difficult conditions for having failed to discover
the “Shang City to the North of the Huan River.” Even so, the
delays in the official announcement of the new finds, and the
silence about the fact that they were made in connection with
an international collaboration project, betrays a worrisome
lack of style. Nevertheless, the investigators are continuing
their collaboration with remarkable perseverance,
circumspection, and modesty, in the confidence that the facts
will be known eventually.
The Gongying Project. Whereas a certain number of urban sites
from the Chinese Bronze Age, with their impressive
temple/palace buildings, have been at least partly excavated
in the course of the twentieth century, scholars have often
bemoaned the lack of data from the low-ranking end of the
settlement and building hierarchies. This imbalance is all the
more regrettable given that written sources do provide at least
some idea about life in cities, at least during the late
pre-Imperial period, whereas the absence of written records
concerning early villages in China is just as complete as that
of archaeological information. To start remedying this
situation, a joint project between Wuhan University and the
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Paris), led by
Yang Baocheng and Alain Thote, started in 2000 to excavate a
village site dating from Western Zhou through Springs and
Autumns times at Gongying near Nanyang, in southern Henan. The
existence of this site had been known for some time, and it is
included in the Atlas of Cultural Relics of Henan Province. The
excavations are still ongoing.
Like most urban settlement sites in China, Gongying is
a maze of innumerable pits: dwellings, storage buildings,
16
disused dwellings or storage-buildings that had experienced
secondary use as rubbish-pits, as well as pits that had served
as rubbish-pits from the very start. The longer such sites are
occupied, the more difficult it becomes to untangle the sequence
of occupations, to identify individual buildings, and to
reconstruct episodes in the settlement layout. Hence such
sites are tremendously difficult to excavate, and most Chinese
archaeologists much prefer digging up tombs.
In order to deal with these practical problems, the
French archaeologists participating in the
Project--experienced field technicians, but without any
previous China experience--have introduced methods of
excavation that are new to China, though they have been used
in Europe for many years and are also known in Japan. They have
abandoned the practice of digging in grids, normally of 5x5 m
units--i.e. 4x4 m pits separated by 1 m-wide baulks--in favor
of exposing larger surfaces, on which architectural features
become easier to see. In this way, they “peel off” the site
layer by layer. (The task of retaining control of the vertical
dimension, the main original rationale for leaving baulks, has
become unproblematic with the help of modern surveying
equipment.) Moreover, they have also persuaded their
collaborators to allow them to dig--for the first time in the
history of Chinese archaeology!--in excavation units that are
not laid out according to the points of the compass, arguing
that in this way it is easier to detect cardinally-aligned
building remains. The results appear to have borne out the
wisdom of these decisions, which were risky because they
countervened current official regulations promulgated by the
State Bureau of Cultural Relics. Perhaps the most important
benefit of a well-run international collaboration project is
that it provides practical opportunities of trying out
different approaches, comparing experiences, and discussing
them in a colleagial setting. With patience and considerable
intercultural skills, the leaders of the Gongying Project
fostered such intellectual exchange in an atmosphere of mutual
respect.
The importance of the prospective results of this Project
cannot be understated. Again, one main reason is that the data
recovered will constitute a comprehensive sample that will be
representative in a statistical sense and thus amenable to
various forms of quantitative analysis. We may look forward
to significant new insights into the food production and
consumption, artisanal production, space use patterns, and
living habits of the Gongying village population, and into their
adaption to the local environment. Of course, future
investigations of other village sites will have to establish
the extent to which these finds are representative for north
17
China during this period. But the Gongying Projects sets a most
valuable precedent, and a gauge for evaluating future results.
The Chifeng Project. Undertaken since 1997 by Jilin University
and the University of Pittsburgh with Zhang Zhongpei and
Katheryn M. Linduff as co-PIs, the Chifeng Project is one of
several projects of regional analysis currently ongoing in
various parts of North China. That they have all concentrated
on prehistoric and protohistoric periods--and more
specifically on the Late Neolithic and the transition to the
Bronze Age--mainly reflects, I suspect, the topical orientation
of American-style anthropological archaeology and its almost
fetishistic fixation on such abstractions as the “Emergence of
Social Complexity,” the “Transition to State-Level
Organization,” and the “Origins of Civilization.” There is
hope, nevertheless, that the results will eventually affect the
understanding of later, fully historical periods; and the
Chifeng Project, in particular, seems at least to be collecting
data that could be important to such a reconceptualization.
The survey area comprises a river valley in west-central
Liaoning, in a transitionary ecological zone between the
Mongolian steppe and the agricultural areas bordering on the
Gulf of Bohai. Over the centuries, this area saw different
forms of exploitation--and, consequently, radically different
archaeological complexes--as ecological conditions changed.
In a dissertation based on a preliminary survey of one river
valley in this area, Gideon Shelach (The Hebrew
University)--now one of the core participants in the Chifeng
Project--established different settlement zones and different
types of settlement corresponding to each zone in each
archaeological period from the Neolithic through the end of the
Bronze Age. Building on these results, the Project has taken
on much larger sectors for systematic, full-coverage survey.
Robert Drennan of the University of Pittsburgh--famous for his
work on settlement archaeology in the Andes but with no previous
China experience--introduced novel, computer-aided methods of
data processing that have made this kind of research far more
efficient. In conjunction with the survey, several
highly-stratified settlement sites in the survey area are being
carefully excavated with the aim of gathering data on
socio-economic patterns.
The Liangchengzhen Project. Launched in 1997 under the joint
auspices of Shandong University and Yale University (later
replaced by the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago),
and co-directed by Luan Fengshi and Anne P. Underhill, this
ambitious project is applying the research strategies of
regional analysis in the coastal plain of southwestern Shandong.
18
Liangchengzhen is a large settlement of the Late Neolithic
Longshan culture--perhaps the largest in areal extent so far
known from this period. It was first excavated by the Institute
of History and Philology (Academia Sinica) in 1937, but due to
political vicissitudes, the report on those early excavations
is still under preparation in Taiwan, and the new project
represents a new departure. Like the Chifeng Project, the
Liangchengzhen Project combines extensive, full-coverage
surface survey with excavations of selected sites. The survey
is now in its seventh season, and perhaps one third of the wider
geographical zone that may have been the “catchment basin” of
the Longshan period chiefdom centered upon Liangchengzhen has
been covered. In another parallel with Chifeng, the Project
has secured the services of internationally famous experts in
regional survey techniques, Gary Feinman and Lynda Nicholas,
who are building on their previous experience in Mexico. The
main rôle of the China experts on these projects consists of
acting as intermediaries between these experts and the Chinese
collaborators.
The results so far are impressive. The survey has
revealed a four-tiered settlement hierarchy for the Late
Neolithic of the survey region, with further chronological
subdivisions within the Dawenkou and Longshan periods enabling
a detailed reconstruction of the settlement history and
developments towards greater concentration toward the end of
the period. The Longshan florescence seems to have been
followed by a collapse, which the Project is now working hard
to explain; Bronze Age sites are fewer in number and smaller
than those of the Longshan period, and apparently marginal. The
first dissertation to come out of the project, by Gwen Bennett
(now Washington University, St. Louis), traces patterns of
increasing intensity in the extraction of lithic resources and
has demonstrated an ongoing trend toward division of labor
between the lithic workshops at the Liangchengzhen site and
those at surrounding medium-size and small settlements. Other
ongoing studies are looking at pottery production as one
indicator of ongoing socio-economic trends.
The project’s three seasons of large-scale excavations
at Liangchengzhen since 1998 have cleared a part of the ancient
settlement. A number of buildings has been uncovered,
including, apparently, at least one large structure built on
a raised platform, monumental for its time. While there are
remains of a deep ditch, no surrounding walls have been
identified as yet that would clinch the characterization of the
site as “urban.” Since this is in part a training excavation
for Shandong University students, Wenwuju excavation rules have
been followed quite rigidly. An innovation vis-à-vis
traditional practices in China is that small objects,
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especially ecological evidence such as bones and seeds, are now
recovered by screening the soil and by subjecting soil samples
to flotation.
The Project is designed to be a longterm one.
Potentially, Liangchengzhen could become a source of data on
the Late Neolithic that would be unparalleled in their
completeness and representativeness not only in China, but on
a worldwide scale--a veritable laboratory for the testing of
models of social development in a chiefdom context.
The Yiluo River Valley Project. Jointly sponsored by the
Institute of Archaeology, CASS, and La Trobe University in
Australia, this project has been ongoing since 1996 under the
direction of Chen Xingcan and Liu Li. The research area is near
Luoyang, one of the central places of traditional Chinese
civilization. The large Early Bronze Age site of Erlitou, which
is near Luoyang, has been interpreted as a possible capital of
the still-legendary Xia dynasty. To gain an insight into early
socio-political processes in this important area, the Yiluo
River Project is focusing on the development of settlement
around the time of transition from chiefdom-level to
state-level social organization, i.e. from Longshan to Erlitou;
and in order to put these developments into a more longterm
evolutionary perspective, data for the full timespan from the
Neolithic through the Bronze Age are being gathered.
Originally, the participants had hoped to launch their project
at Luoyang itself, but this was prevented by local jealousies.
Instead, they have been working in the adjacent area comprising
the lower course of the Luo river before its confluence with
the Yellow River, as well as several valleys of confluents. The
full-coverage survey methods are comparable to that of the
above-mentioned two projects.
The Yiluo River Project has traced manifest changes in
the settlement pattern from nucleated pattern in the Late
Neolithic to a more strongly hierarchical one in the Bronze Age.
Moreover, resource exploitation became more intense over time.
While such findings may not be a solution to the problem of the
historicity of the Xia, they are tremendously significant
because they indicate that, whatever name one may wish to use
to the period between ca. 2100 and 1500 BC that is traditionally
assigned to the Xia dynasty, a significant and apparently quite
sudden rise in social complexity did occur in this area.
Previously, all those who wished to argue this had only vessel
shapes and object categories to work from, but no quantitative
evidence such as that now gathered by the Yiluo River Project.
Inspired by the successes of the Yiluo River Project,
the Institute of Archaeology (CASS) has now begun to mount its
own full-coverage surface survey around the Erlitou site, the
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results of which stand to complement those from the Yiluo River
Project. It is encouraging to see that the new approaches
introduced by international collaborative projects are
beginning to energize research practices within China itself.
The Origins of Rice Project. This project took place in the
mid-Nineties under the auspices of Peking University and the
Peabody-Essex Museum and was led by Yan Wenming and the late
Richard A. MacNeish. It investigated various caves in Jiangxi
province that had been inhabited by prehistoric populations at
the time of transition from hunting-gathering to food
production (ca. 10000-5000 BC). This is an area where wild
species of rice still grow today, and which is believed to have
been one place, if not the only place, where rice was originally
domesticated. Using the methodology developed in MacNeish’s
pioneering work on maize in the New World, the Project traced
the domestication process through the analysis of seed samples
obtained in careful stratigraphic excavation. Aside from
confirming a very early date of 8000 BC or so for the
domestication of rice in this area, this project was valuable
for introducing various field techniques of plant data recovery
and analysis to China.
Nevertheless, the Project was terminated on a sour note,
and the publication of a definite report on its epoch-making
results has been stalled indefinitely. It stands as a lesson
of what to avoid in an international collaboration. Knowing
neither Chinese nor the archaeological record in his research
area, the by then quite aged MacNeish regarded Jiangxi as
nothing more than yet another stage on which to apply his
research methods. His lack of interest in any exchange of
scholarly opinion with his Chinese counterparts adversely
affected not only the working atmosphere but indeed the progress
of data collection. Back in the United States, MacNeish,
against the rules of his agreement, proceeded to publish the
finds on his own, but the resulting preliminary reports are
incomprehensible as they do not take into account the
established cultural sequences in the area.
The Salt Archaeology Project. This interdisciplinary project
was launched in 1999 by Peking University and UCLA under the
joint direction of Li Shuicheng, Sun Hua, and myself in order
to investigate the archaeological remains of the ancient salt
industry of the Upper Yangzi Basin (Sichuan province and
Chongqing municipality) and its influence on the area’s social,
economic, and ecological development in a longterm perspective.
Salt production has been an economic mainstay of the region for
many centuries; while there is ample written evidence about it,
especially from recent periods, virtually no archaeological
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work had been undertaken before the start of this Project. By
contrast, salt archaeology has a long history in western
countries and in Japan. While regrettably no foreign
specialist in this field could be found to direct the fieldwork
on a longterm basis, several have been brought in for brief
periods and offered valuable advice.
One of the aims of the Salt Archaeology Project is to
trace the prehistoric origins of salt production in the research
area and to reconstruct the pottery-based salt-production
techniques that preceded the introduction of iron pans in the
Han dynasty. As an initial stage, Project members participated
in excavations at the site of Zhongba in Zhong Xian (Chongqing),
near the village of Ganjingzhen, where salt is recorded to have
been produced from the Han period until the 1960s. Zhongba is
notable for its enormous deposits of sherds of salt-making
ceramics. Three different types of such ceramics have been
identified, representing successive stages in the local
development of salt-production techniques from ca. 2000 through
300 BC. Traces of workshops are relatively faint, and the
salt-making procedures are still being reconstructed. It is
clear, in any case, that the scale of production was enormous,
calling for a revision of previous assumptions regarding the
level of social and political development of the area’s native
Ba inhabitants.
Working alongside archaeologists from the Institute of
Cultural Relics and Archaeology of Sichuan Province, who have
been hurriedly excavating the entirety of Zhongba before the
site is submerged under the Three Gorges reservoir, the Salt
Archaeology Project has conducted a relatively intensive
excavation of a single 81-square meter unit, generating data
that, unlike those obtained by the Sichuan colleagues, are
statistically representative and may be used as a means to
evaluate the data from the site as a whole. Aside from
recovering and analyzing many tens of thousands of sherds of
salt-making ceramics, Project members Pochan Chen and Rowan
Flad have assembled, through screening, a sample of 150,000 or
so animal and fish bones, the first comprehensive faunal sample
from a prehistoric site ever to have been assembled in China
(it is now installed at the basement of Peking University’s
Sackler Museum). These materials are currently being analyzed
in order to determine whether they might have been used in the
industrial production of meat and fish-based secondary products
involving salt. Plant remains have also been collected, and
their analysis is currently underway.
The Salt Archaeology Project aims to breach the boundary
between prehistoric and historic periods and trace the
development of salt production through its material remains all
the way through recent periods; archaeological approaches are
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combined with ethnographic and cultural-geographical research.
As the Project’s next stage, it is planned to excavate a salt
factory of medieval date and comparing it to the Zhongba remains.
Settlement-pattern surveys around known salt-producing sites
are also planned in order to delineate the wider social context
the ancient salt industry and its local economic impact. At
Zhongba, attempts in that direction have been stymied by the
fact that, in this part of China, subsurface remains are
invisible under to the ubiquitous terraced rice paddies. Based
on experiences in Japan and Southeast Asia, the Project hopes
to develop survey techniques that can deal with such conditions.
There are various additional international
collaboration projects one could mention, including several
large-scale ones involving Japanese institutions.
But the
preceding enumeration should suffice to provide an impression
of the tremendous potential of such projects in heightening the
quality of fieldwork performed in China, and, above all,
introducing new ways of conceptualizing the problems of
archaeological research.
Perhaps their most significant
innovation has been the introduction of settlement archaeology
to China, which has led to a transformation of the manner in
which space and time are conceptualized.
The computer-savvy
archaeologists of the younger generation who have participated
in these projects have fewer psychological barriers vis-à-vis
quantitative methods than their elders, and we may look forward
to many significant contributions from them.
It would be presumptuous to argue that such contributions
would be impossible without further involvement of foreign
scholars and institutions.
Currently, however, this seems
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pragmatically to be the case due to the Chinese participants’
lack of financial resources (which one hopes will turn out to
be temporary as China becomes even more economically
prosperous).
While Wenwuju policy with respect to the granting
of permits for collaborative research projects is still
evolving and has not been notable for its consistency or
predicability, there are good reasons to expect that such
projects will be able continue in future years.
Patience is,
however, warranted, and for an untenured archaeologist at a US
institution, for instance, it may be risky to make a career
dependent on the success of such a project.
Moreover, some good
sense is needed in the choice of one’s collaborators: those
intent on embarking on a collaboration for the sole reason of
obtaining cash inflow should probably be avoided.
Undesirable
arrangements are those where the host institution offers to do
the fieldwork without any involvement by the foreign researcher,
who merely provides the funds and is then promised to be allowed
to study the finds; as well as those where the host institution
attempts to lure the foreign researcher with promises for
complete freedom in conducting his/her own field research
without interference from Chinese collaborators (promises that,
of course, are completely unfulfillable under established
rules).
For intellectual as well as pragmatic reasons, the only
feasible arrangements are those under which Chinese and foreign
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researchers spend time--preferably long periods of time--in the
field together, with each side knowing the ideas and intentions
of the other and forging common research objectives through
discussion in an atmosphere of mutual respect and trust.
While
this may not always be easy, my own experience shows that this
is not only possible, but highly satisfying in the end.
It
follows as a matter of course that the principal collaborators
on the foreign side of a successful project must be fully
conversant in Chinese and well acquainted with Chinese
archaeology.
International collaboration projects in China are
absolutely crucial if Chinese archaeology is to develop into
a proper field of study outside of China.
It is probably fair
to say that, in Western academic institutions today, Chinese
archaeology does not occupy a position at all commensurate with
its undeniable importance.
Among the great civilizations of
the world, it is unquestionably the one that is least taught
in university settings and has least influenced the discourse
in the Humanities and the Social Sciences.
Western-based
scholars in this field have been too few, and for the most part
too marginal, to bring about any change in this situation.
The
three major obstacles are the language barrier, the failure of
publications by Chinese archaeologists to speak to the
interests of the archaeological discipline in the West, and the
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historical lack of opportunities for Western scholars to
acquire hands-on training in the field.
The language barrier,
of course, will always be with us (it is made all the more
formidable by the fact that much important secondary
scholarship in the field is being published in Japanese, but
this is true in many branches of Sinology); it can only be
mitigated by improvements in language-teaching methods and
enhanced opportunities for students to spend time in China.
The
availability of field opportunities in China, on the other hand,
potentially removes the two remaining obstacles and thereby
significantly changes the outlook for students intent on
pursuing Chinese archaeology seriously.
By creating
opportunities for sustained intellectual exchange in a concrete
field situation, international collaboration projects, they
stand to remove at least some of the reasons why scholars on
both sides have so far less than fully appreciated each other’s
work.
And more importantly, they provide a tremendously
valuable training ground for future Western-based experts in
this important field.
The consequences of the new situation are already
starting to become palpable.
In the US, for instance, job
prospects in anthropology departments--which are, for better
or worse, the setting in which serious archaeological work takes
place in the United States--have historically been extremely
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dim for specialists in Chinese archaeology, some individuals
with such a background have actually been hired for positions
in anthropology since the mid-Nineties.
It is certain that the
prospect of their conducting an active field project in their
area of specialization has made the major difference in bringing
about this incipient interest.
So far, the number of successful
placements of Chinese archaeology experts is yet too few to know
whether this constitutes a trend.
We are still very far away
from a situation where experts on Chinese archaeology enjoy
numerical equity with their colleagues working on Egypt and
Mesopotamia, not to speak of the New World civlizations.
Ultimately, of course, such experts should be present
at every institution of higher learning where archaeology is
taught.
Foundation seed funding for academic positions might
bring about welcome momentum into this direction, though as the
number of potential candidates is still small, any program of
bringing this about should proceed with circumspection, lest
either valuable FTEs be filled by individuals of below-average
skills, or mainland China be drained of all its internationally
marketable talent in archaeology (i.e. of the very colleagues
who are direly needed as potential collaborators there).
In
the end, such a situation would be propitious neither to the
field, nor to the individuals concerned.
A more immediately
important priority for future foundation engagement in the
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coming decades, therefore, is the continuation and expansion
of international archaeological collaboration projects in
China. Given the need of the field for large and complex
datasets, these projects must be large-scale and
interdisciplinary.
They will be expensive (though, with
current consumption levels in China, still less so than would
be the case in many other parts of the world).
In any case,
their potential contribution--their ability to bring about a
new and improved understanding of Chinese civilization
throughout its history--will be invaluable and radiate far
beyond the scope of archaeology.
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