Page 32 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

olithic archaeologists, which included Pei Wenzhong (1904-1982), who had excavated the first
almost intact cranium of Peking Man at Zhoukoudian in 1929 and discovered in situ stone tool
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artifacts and evidence of the use of fire by the Peking Man in 1931. Tragically, the more than
forty fossil remains of Peking Man which had been kept by several Americans in China, were
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all lost in December 1941. After Black's death in 1934, Weidenreich was hired to continue
anatomical studies on the Peking Man. Weidenriech published most of his own research,
and his publications, as well as those of Black, proved to be vital records after the fossils'
disappearance. 38
Andersson established the practice of gathering experts from different disciplines to
research and excavate archaeological sites. For example, Yuan Fuli (Chinese, 1893-1987), an
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American-educated geologist, and Zdansky were the principals in the Yangshao excavation
and topographical survey. At Andersson's invitation, Black studied the human skeletons at
Yangshao, identifying them as proto-Chinese, similar to those of the present-day northern Chi-
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nese. Such collaborative strategies remain the method of choice for interpreting the findings
of archaeological excavations.
While archaeological work continued, academics in other related fields had come to be
called the "Questioning Antiquity" school (yi gu pai). Headed by Gu Jiegang (1893-1980), they
determined that the chronicles of the three huang "emperors" and five di "emperors" of pre-

dynastic China (before 2000 BCE) had been created by Confucians and other schools that
arose only after the Eastern Zhou period. Records of the early dynastic epoch (or Xia and
Shang dynasties, c. the 2ist-nth century BCE), moreover, were extremely sparse, and those that
recount the history of the Xia and early Shang were also found to be unreliable, to the point
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that some even doubted the existence of the Xia. More than two thousand years of received
wisdom and Chinese historiography were being challenged: suddenly an entire corpus of his-
tory— and the legendary sages of antiquity, model rulers, and early dynasties —had been sub-
verted. China itself seemed to have lost its roots. Who but the Chinese archaeologist would be
able to reconstruct early Chinese history?
Locating Yinxu (the Ruins of Yin) at Anyang, the purported Late Shang capital, became
the first priority of Chinese scholars. The archaeologists' objective was the same as that of tra-
ditional Chinese historiographers and antiquarians: to test the veracity of the classics and their
annotations and, in so doing, to fill in the lacunae of history (zhengjing bushi). In 1928, the Insti-
tute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica founded an official Archaeological Section,
which embarked on its initial field work at Anyang in the fall of that same year under Fu Sinian
(1896-1950), the director of the institute and an eminent historian. Dong Zuobin (1895-1963),
a gifted palaeographer of oracle-bone inscriptions despite a lack of university or archaeological
training, was the engineer. Dong's intention was to explore whether oracle bones might still
survive in underground Yinxu after thirty years of exhaustive hunting had turned up little. The
field work yielded nearly eight hundred pieces of inscribed oracle bones. 42

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