The Location of Chinese Archaeological Theory

Sunday, May 2nd
2:00 pm-5:30 pm

Session Organizers: Roderick Campbell (Brown University) and Rowan Flad (Harvard University)

If the internationalization of Chinese archaeology has heralded an explosive growth in new (especially archaeometric) techniques, the development of theory (which informs those techniques and the interpretations that arise from them) has been far less visible. The papers in this session, presented by Mainland Chinese and Taiwanese archaeologists, will reflect on the history and direction of Chinese archaeological thinking and its relationship to theory in Euro-American archaeology. Does the proclaimed ‘universality’ of theory shield underlying Western biases from critical view? Is or should there be an archaeological theory with specifically Chinese characteristics and sensitivities? And how does China’s particular historical experience — with Western Imperialism, with modernism, nationalism, communism, internationalization, and countervailing discourses of cultural uniqueness — shape Chinese archaeology as a discipline?

2:00: Roderick Campbell (Brown University) and Rowan Flad (Harvard University): Introduction
2:15: QIN Ling (Peking University): Lost in Translation: Language and Content in the Dialogue Between Chinese and Western Scholars
2:40: FANG Hui (Shangdong University): Historical Geography and Settlement Survey: The Contributions of the Southeast Lu Regional Survey to Social Archaeology
3:05: ZHANG Hai (Peking University): The Historiographical Tradition of Chinese Archaeology
3:30: Coffee break
4:00: CHEN Xingcan (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences): Historical Investigations: The Connection between Culture-historical Typology and the Multiple Origins-Single Body Theory of the Chinese People
4:25: LI Yung-ti (Academia Sinica, Taiwan): What Happened to “New Archaeology”: Processual Archaeology and Its Impact in China
4:50: GUO Lixin (Sun Yat-sen University): The Coming Turn in Chinese Archaeological Research
5:15: Discussion

Participants and Abstracts

Lost in Translation: Language and Content in the Dialogue Between Chinese and Western Scholars

QIN Ling (Peking University, Department of Archaeology)

When linguists discuss “untranslatability”, they frequently distinguish between linguistic and cultural untranslatability. This paper will examine two examples to discuss the “academic untranslatability” that can arise when Chinese archaeology faces West.

The first example concerns the use of Western academic terminology in China, specifically the concept of “domestication” in research on the origins of agriculture and the different interpretations and loss of semantic content that has come about through its importation into Chinese archaeology. The second example is of the opposite situation and concerns the problems encountered when Chinese concepts are brought to bear on Western scholarly problematics: specifically, the issues of change and loss that arise from transplanting the Chinese historical concept of “guo” onto the Western linguistic territory of state origins research. The choice of these two examples is based on both the unavoidability of issues such as the origins of agriculture and the state in archeological theory and, on the other hand, to underline the fact that issues of translatability work both ways across the Chinese/Western divide.

If we can agree that Chinese archaeology is not wholly a Western import, but rather has its own local characteristics then this kind of “scholarly untranslatability” will always exist – this is a problem that must be confronted in any dialogue between Chinese and Western archaeologists.

Historical Geography and Settlement Survey: The Contributions of the Southeast Lu Regional Survey to Social Archaeology

FANG Hui (Shangdong University, Center for East Asian Archaeology)

Historical geography is a technique of traditional Chinese historiography aimed at reconstructing ancient locations through analysis of place references in ancient texts. Settlement survey on the other hand is a technique of Western archaeology used in Mainland China only in the last 15 years that aims to reconstruct ancient settlement distributions through systematic surface collection and excavation. While settlement survey was developed by American “New Archaeologists” who promoted their approach as scientific and in opposition to history, I will argue that traditional “historiographic” approaches can be married successfully to “scientific” archaeological methods to produce a more satisfactory social archaeology than either technique can produce alone.

The Historiographical Tradition of Chinese Archaeology

ZHANG Hai (Peking University, Department of Archaeology)

The historiographical tradition of Chinese archaeology is as old as Chinese archaeology itself dating back to the 1930s. With the radical doubting of traditional history that accompanied the revolutionary movement, archaeology, a new, scientific, approach introduced from the West was highly expected to reconstruct a lost Chinese history. Through various iterations, from Marxist historiography to new, archaeometric techniques, the aim has remained to reconstruct a new history of ancient China. Nevertheless, this focus has served to restrict archaeological research to the domain of history both from the perspective of theory and method. Consequently, Chinese archaeology seldom shares the concerns of anthropology and sociology seen in Western archaeology and proper, quantitative, treatments of data are missing. These shortcomings have impeded the development of Chinese archaeology.

Historical Investigations: The Connection between Culture-historical Typology and the Multiple Origins-Single Body Theory of the Chinese People

CHEN Xingcan (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Institute of Archaeology)

Culture-historical typology is one of Chinese archaeology’s most important research methods. It has important value for studying the origins, development and change of China’s prehistoric cultures, as well as for the investigation of the formation and development of Chinese culture. This paper will pursue the development of culture-historical typology in Chinese archaeology and its relationship to the “multiple origins, single body” theory.

What Happened to “New Archaeology”: Processual Archaeology and Its Impact in China

LI Yung-ti (Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan)

Chinese archaeology has become rapidly internationalized and westernized in the past decade. Amid numerous conference papers, international joint projects, and publications with ever fancier titles, few may remember that three decades ago the introduction of “New Archaeology” into China was hotly debated among archaeologists of the past generation. This paper argues that the early efforts may have had less impact than what the pioneering advocates anticipated, and that more fundamental influences only began to form after Chinese archaeology became open to its western counterparts through joint projects and academic exchanges. This paper also argues that while the idea of “New Archaeology” became popular, the actual practice, and most of all, the deductive approach, has yet to be firmly established.

The Coming Turn in Chinese Archaeological Research

GUO Lixin (Sun Yat-sen University, Department of Anthropology)

Chinese archaeology was born out of the particular conditions of China’s centuries-long road to modernity and its mission has always been to build a new history for the Chinese people, to restore the self-confidence lost through China’s experience with Western Imperialism. This historical condition has given Chinese archaeology its historicist and special interest focus and led to an extreme lack of interest in archaeological theory. Nevertheless, with the basics of Chinese culture history worked out and in the current climate of internationalization and demands that Chinese archaeology make contributions to world archaeology, Chinese archaeology must change. The question is in what direction? This author believes that the most pressing need in Chinese archaeology is the cross-cultural perspective of social-cultural anthropology and a renewed focus on “people”.