| Page 320 | |
foreign diffusion). Chinese archaeologists hoped that “if we can trace back the distribution and development of the black pottery culture at Chengziyai, most problems in the formative period of Chinese history would be resolved” (Li 1990, 193). Therefore, as Li Chi further pointed out, this discovery not only identified a homeland for a part of the Shang culture but also made a major contribution to knowledge about the origins of Chinese civilization.
While the Academia Sinica headed by Li Chi was working in Henan and Shandong, the National Beiping Academy, led by Xu Xusheng, carried out excavations at Doujitai in Shaanxi Province in 1934–1937. The intention was to search for the prehistoric origins of the Zhou dynasty. su bingqi, who later became the paramount senior archaeologist in China, participated in this project and established his first research achievement on ceramic typology, focusing on changing forms of the li vessels (Falkenhausen 1999a; Su 1948). Su regarded li as a vessel form that was a diagnostic for ethnic affiliations and Chinese civilization. His approach turned into a model in an archaeological methodology for several generations of Chinese students to follow.
The origins of Chinese culture have been a most sensitive issue in Chinese archaeology. Upon his discovery of the Yangshao culture, Andersson determined to find the route of eastward cultural diffusion in northwestern China. Based on his findings in the Gansu region, Andersson established a sequence of ceramic cultures that perfectly supported his hypothesis. According to this sequence, the Yangshao culture was preceded by the indigenous Qijia culture in western China, so the western origin of Yangshao pottery became logical.
The discovery of the Longshan culture in the 1930s changed the paradigm of the solely western origin for Chinese civilization inferred from Yangshao painted pottery. The Longshan culture, which was characterized by black pottery, was thought to represent the indigenous Chinese culture, which arose in eastern China and was contemporary with, but independent of, the Yangshao culture in western China. As a result, a new concept for the dual origins of Chinese civilization was put forward: while the Yangshao culture diffused from west to east, the Longshan culture moved from east to west. The two traditions were thought to have encountered one another and mixed, and later became the progenitor of the Shang civilization (Chang 1999a; Chen 1997, 217–227, 276–281; Liang 1959). This proposition dominated archaeological circles until the 1950s.
During the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and the subsequent civil war (1945–1949), major archaeological projects were halted although some fieldwork was still occasionally carried out in peripheral regions. Xia Nai participated in the Academia Sinica’s expedition in the northwestern part of the country, where his excavations yielded stratigraphic evidence indicating that the Qijia culture was in fact later than the Yangshao culture. This conclusion challenged Andersson’s sequence of prehistoric cultures in western China and therefore his theory on the western origin of the Yangshao culture. Xia Nai’s victory over Andersson on this issue became legendary and inspired Chinese archaeologists for decades.
During this formative period of the discipline, Chinese archaeologists struggled to achieve two primary objectives: to defend their belief in the indigenous origins of Chinese culture against foreign diffusionism and to reconstruct a reliable cultural history based on material remains in order to clear up the uncertainties in textual records that had been attacked by historical revisionists known as “the doubters of antiquity.” These objectives, in turn, determined the nature of archaeology as an enterprise closely aligned to the ethnic nationalism that was centered on the Han Chinese.
When the Communist Party took over China in 1949, the archaeologists in the Institute of History and Philology at the Academia Sinica were split into two groups. Li Chi and several of his colleagues moved to Taiwan while Xia Nai and
| |