source of the oracle bones at Xiaotun in Anyang further facilitated the identification of Yinxu at that site.

The emergence of nationalism at the beginning of the twentieth century was a significant political stimulus to the development of modern archaeology. At the same time, many revolutionary intellectuals became discontented with the sense of China under the Manchus as politically and militarily inferior to the force of foreign countries, and this discontent led to an awakening of nationalism. Liang Qichao, a Confucian reformer, was the first to heighten Chinese national consciousness, particularly in response to Japanese aggression. He pointed out in 1900 that the people of China had failed to give a name to their own country and that they referred to themselves by dynasties rather than by country. The word China (Zhongguo), Liang noted, “is what people of other races call us. It is not a name the people of this country have selected for themselves” (Liang 1992, 67–68).

In the early twentieth century, the concept of nationalism was ethnically centered on the Han Chinese, and minority groups were largely neglected (Dikotter 1992, 123–125; Townsend 1996). This situation was explicitly addressed by Sun Yat-sen when he said, “China, since the Qin and Han dynasties, has been developing a single state out of a single race” (Sun Yat-sen 1943, 6). According to Sun, although the Chinese people were distinct from all other “races” of the world, the boundaries of the race were drawn along the borders of the Chinese state and no comparable ethnic distinctions were made within China itself. Minority peoples were thus expected to adjust their beliefs and behavior if they wished to be counted among “the Chinese people” (Fitzgerald 1996, 69). Within this broad political climate, many Chinese intellectuals constantly endeavored to promote the self-consciousness of national identity, and the search for Chinese cultural origins became an important part of their intellectual agenda. The initial impetus for archaeological research was closely tied to this issue.

It should be noted that after the 1911 revolution, as the revolutionaries gained power and controlled the country, the concept of nationalism moved away from a racial/ethnocentric orientation to one of a state-based political entity. In time, the Nationalist government prescribed an elaborate cultural regimen to assist the peoples of Tibet, Mongolia, Manchuria, Xinjiang, and the Han regions to achieve a thorough comprehension of their common racial identity (wuzu gonghe, a republic of five nationalities) and to recover the sentiment of “central loyalty” toward the state (Chiang Kai-shek 1947, 10–13). However, this new concept of nationalism, which included multi-ethnic groups, seems to have been practiced more in the political arena than in the cultural domain, with the dominant ideology in China remaining centered on the cultural superiority of the Han race. The yellow emperor (Huangdi), a legendary sage king, was continuously elevated to the status of the founding ancestor of the Han Chinese as a symbol of national identity (Liu 1999).

It was only after the 1950s, under communism, that multi-ethnic nationalism began to affect archaeology, which is evident in the shift of emphasis from the central plains (Zhongyuan) to a focus on multiregional development. It is not surprising, therefore, that the choice of locations for early excavations by Chinese archaeologists was based on the primary concern of the search for the indigenous cultural origins of the Han Chinese. Moreover, influenced by the May Fourth Movement of 1919, the traditional Confucian ways of learning were criticized while western science and field methodology became influential (Li 1977, 34–35; Xia 1979). A group of young historians, referred to as “doubters of antiquity” (yigupai) and led by Gu Jiegang (1893–1979), developed a skeptical view of textual accounts of Chinese history. Their mission was to search for scientific evidence to reconstruct Chinese history (Schneider 1971). Archaeology, therefore, was endorsed by the yigupai as a scientific device to achieve this goal.

In the early twentieth century, modern archaeological fieldwork methods were introduced into China by western scholars, but they were not, however, necessarily archaeologists. The major investigations by foreigners included surveys of Paleolithic sites in Ningxia, Inner Mongolia, and northern Shaanxi Province by