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Xia Nai

(1910–1985)

The British-trained Xia Nai was the premier archaeologist of Communist china. Born in 1910 at Wenzhou (Zhejiang Province), Xia graduated in history from Qinghua University in Beijing in 1934 and subsequently participated in the excavations at anyang. Studying at the University of London from 1935 to 1940, he majored in Egyptology and participated in British excavations in egypt and Palestine. He returned to China in 1941, joining the Institute of History and Philology, part of the Academia Sinica, in 1943. In spite of wartime conditions, Xia undertook important excavations at Neolithic sites in Gansu Province in 1944 and 1945. He was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of London in 1946.

In 1950, one year after the Communist takeover of his homeland, Xia was appointed deputy director of the newly founded Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (since 1977 the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) in Beijing. From the outset, Xia almost single-handedly ran the institute, which he led as its director from 1962 to 1982. A member of the Communist Party since 1959, Xia was criticized and sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) but allowed to resume scholarly activities as early as 1971. From 1982 until his death in 1985, he served as deputy director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

A brilliant organizer and administrator, Xia established the institute as the paramount archaeological institution in China during a time of tremendous state-sponsored expansion. He was instrumental in creating structures for training, fieldwork, and publication and in framing relevant laws and regulations. During the 1950s Xia launched many major fieldwork projects, personally directing the excavations at Hui Xian (1950) and Changsha (1951), the salvage excavations near the Yellow River dam near Sanmenxia (1956–58), and the 1956 excavation of an imperial Ming tomb near Beijing.

Xia kept abreast of the archaeological discoveries of all periods everywhere in China, editing two syntheses. As the editor of several archaeological journals and a monograph series, he was concerned with divorcing scientific archaeology from antiquarian treasure hunting, and he insisted that excavated evidence should be treated as a separate class of data and scrutinized extensively before being integrated into historical frameworks. Xia’s own publications mainly concern the history of technology and Sino-western connections, two areas in which he could capitalize on his knowledge of foreign languages, rare among Chinese archaeologists. Though not completely eschewing a nationalistic agenda or Marxist rhetoric, his work adhered to the highest scholarly standards. In it Xia tried to demonstrate the relevance of archaeology to the scientifically minded Communist elite, as well as strengthen his own position as the representative of Chinese archaeology in the international arena.

Because post–Cultural Revolution Chinese diplomacy used archaeology to generate international goodwill, Xia was frequently sent abroad, where he was showered with academic honors. Although his manner of running Chinese archaeology centrally through the Institute of Archaeology has become impractical since