He was able to identify that the stone circle was part of a much larger site comprising avenues and ditches and an earthwork enclosure. He was also the first to notice the significance of the orientation of Stonehenge and its potential astrological significance. Stukeley and his patron and friend, the earl of Pembroke, engaged in some limited excavations within the stone circle and learned that the monoliths had been levered into holes in the solid chalk floor of the plain and then packed in with flints for stability.

Accurate measurement, precise draftsmanship, intelligent understanding of the relationship of monuments to landscape, and an ability to make rewarding comparisons with similar sites and structures—all of these qualities made Stukeley a pioneer in field archaeology. He became a minister of the church in 1726 and gave up field archaeology to work on his books Stonehenge (1740) and Avebury (1743). His record of the sites as they stood in the early-eighteenth century were invaluable to archaeologists of the twentieth century.

Graham Parry

References

For references, see Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Archaeologists, Vol. 1, ed. Tim Murray (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999), p. 49.

Su Bingqi

(1909–1997)

Su Bingqi was the major archaeological theoretician in the People’s Republic of china. Born in Gaoyang (Hebei Province), he graduated from Beiping Normal University in 1934 and then worked at the Society (after 1936, the Institute) for Historical Studies of the National Beiping Academy. As an assistant to the historian Xu Xusheng (Xu Bingchang, 1888–1976), who sought to substantiate archaeologically the then-novel theory that China’s early dynasties each had different ethnic origins, Su had his first taste of fieldwork when he participated in excavations at Doujitai, Baoji (Shaanxi Province) in 1934–1937. After the academy had relocated to Kunming in Yunnan Province in southern China during World War II, Su wrote an archaeological report on the Doujitai tombs (published in 1948), applying the method of Swedish archaeologist oscar montelius in his meticulous typological analysis of ceramic vessels.

After the Communist takeover in 1949, the Beiping Academy was dissolved. In 1950, both Su and his teacher Xu Xusheng were appointed research fellows at the newly founded Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (since 1977, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) in Beijing. Su participated for a time in the institute’s fieldwork, and his chronology of late Zhou tombs at Luoyang (Henan Province), excavated in 1955, was long followed as the standard yardstick for cross-dating finds from all over China.

In 1952, Su was appointed professor in the History Department of Beijing University, where he founded mainland China’s first academic archaeology program. He served as the program’s chair until 1983, simultaneously maintaining his position at the Institute of Archaeology. In 1958, students targeted Su in their criticism of archaeology, which they found insufficiently concerned with real people and society. This spurred Su to conceptualize a new system for the study of prehistoric cultures, enriched with elements of Marxist social theory and an analysis of historical texts. The resulting “Chinese school of archaeology,” tailor-made to accommodate the characteristics of Chinese history as well as contemporary political strictures, became widely influential.

Leading his students in excavations at Neolithic sites in Shaanxi Province in 1958–1959, Su first applied Montelian principles in working out the filiation of chronological and regional phases of the Yangshao culture. He subsequently worked out a general theory of simultaneously developing and interacting regional networks and sequences of cultures from which the Chinese civilization gradually emerged. In the 1980s and 1990s, Su traveled widely across China to inspect Neolithic and early–Bronze Age finds, refining and expanding this grand framework.

During the Cultural Revolution (1966– 1976), Su was subjected to criticism and sent to perform manual labor in the countryside (1970–1972). Marginalized at the Institute of Archaeology because of differences with its