Peake, Harold John Edward

(1867–1946)

The son of a church minister, Harold John Edward Peake was trained in estate management and developed an interest in changes in the history of land tenure and land use. He spent some time on a ranch in British Columbia, canada, where he studied prehistoric pastoralism, and he then studied art and ceramics in japan and china.

Peake returned to England in 1899 and became curator of the Newbury Museum, which became well known for its prehistory exhibits of implements, pots, potsherds, and maps. Peake’s catalog of 17,000 prehistoric British bronze implements was deposited in the British Library in recognition of its significance. Peake was interested in the evidence of the human past in relation to the environment of the time and its impact on people. His book The Bronze Age and the Celtic World (1922) attempted to link archaeology and linguistics while The English Village, published in the same year, was a study of social evolution. He regularly contributed to the Royal Anthropological Institute’s journal.

Peake became well known for his literary collaborations with Professor herbert j. fleure, such as the ten-volume Corridors of Time, written between 1927 and 1936, which provided economic interpretations of the archaeological record. In these volumes, Peake contributed specifically to the debate about the beginning of cereal cultivation in northern mesopotamia during the Neolithic period and to questions on the origins of metallurgy.

Peake was a member of the council of the Royal Anthropological Institute and president of the institute between 1926 and 1928. He received the Huxley Medal in 1940.

Tim Murray

Pei Wenzhong

(1904–1982)

Pei Wenzhong was born in Hebei Province in northern china, the son of a primary schoolteacher who was involved in local anti-illiteracy campaigns. As a young man, Pei became politically active in the areas of better education and wholesale reform of China’s traditional social institutions.

In 1921, Pei was admitted to Beijing University to study geology, and in 1927 he graduated with a major in paleogeology. The following year he went to work in Hebei Province at the site of Pleistocene fossiliferous fissures at Zhoukoudian, where an international team of scientists had been endeavoring since 1921 to uncover evidence of some of China’s earliest human occupants. Beginning in 1929, Pei became field supervisor of the Zhoukoudian excavations, and at the end of the year made the most important discovery of his long career—the first skull of Homo erectus found on Chinese soil. This specimen, later known popularly as Peking man, formed the basis for a thorough reinterpretation of human evolution in eastern Asia.

At Zhoukoudian, Pei was influenced by such scholars as the Canadian anatomist Davidson Black, the U.S. anthropologist Franz Weidenreich, the French Jesuit archaeologist henri breuil and geologist and vertebrate paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and the Swedish archaeologist j. gunnar andersson. The Zhoukoudian excavations from 1921 to 1937 became, in fact, a model not only of multidisciplinary science but also of multinational collegiality.

Pei’s discovery of the Homo erectus cranium at Zhoukoudian catalyzed his lifelong interest in China’s Pleistocene prehistory, and from 1929 to 1935, under his guidance, many important localities at Zhoukoudian were discovered and excavated. These included the earliest archaeological material at the site (500,000 years old), the first unequivocal stone artifacts in association with fossil humans in China, and evidence of the use of fire dating back more than 300,000 years. In 1935, Pei enrolled at the University of Paris to study for his doctorate under Breuil’s direction. Pei completed his degree, returned to Beijing in 1937, and took charge of the Cenozoic research laboratory there. In 1938, he joined the Communist Party.

From 1949 until 1953, Pei was head of the museums division of the Bureau of Social and Cultural Affairs under the Ministry of Culture in the new People’s Republic of China. In 1957, he transferred to the Chinese Academy of Sciences and assumed the title of reseacher in the academy’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology