light of the fact that southeastern China may have played an important role in the development of Chinese civilization (Su 1978).

The discoveries that made the most newspaper headlines during the Cultural Revolution were elite tombs that had been discovered accidentally (Qian, Chen, and Ru et al. 1981). In 1968, for example, western Han royal tombs belonging to the prince Liu Sheng and his wife Douwan (ca. 113 b.c.) were found in Mancheng, Hebei Province. Among some 4,000 grave goods, two jade burial suits, each made of more than 2,000 jade wafers of different shapes tied with gold thread, were the most astonishing finds (Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Hebei 1980).

In 1972, an elaborately furnished western Han burial at Mawangdui in Changsha, Hunan Province, was unearthed. After removing many layers of clay, charcoal, wooden chambers, coffins, and silk garments, a corpse, nearly 2,000 years old, of the lady Dai, was revealed. The body was in perfect condition with no sign of decomposition, and the 138.5 melon seeds preserved in her esophagus, stomach, and intestines indicated the lady’s last meal shortly before her death (Hunan Provincial Museum and Institute of Archaeology 1973).

In 1976, archaeologists excavated a very well-preserved Shang royal burial, tomb number five, in Anyang. Based on bronze inscriptions found in the burial, the tomb was determined to have belonged to one Fuhao, who was referred to as a consort of King Wuding in oracle-bone inscriptions. In addition to the large number of bronze and jade artifacts unearthed from the tomb, this discovery was significant because, for the first time, a named individual in oracle-bone inscriptions was identifiable in an archaeological context (Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences 1980).

The discovery that attracted the most international attention was the underground terracotta army found in 1974 at the mausoleum of the first emperor of the Qin dynasty (221–206 b.c.), Qinshihuangdi, at Lishan, Lintong, Shaanxi Province. Deposits located to the east of the mausoleum include four large pits, three of which contain more than 7,000 life-sized terracotta warriors and horses. In the same year as the discovery, pit number one, the largest of four, which measures 12,600 square meters in area and 4.5–6.5 meters in depth (Shaanxi Institute of Archaeology 1988) was excavated. Five years later, the first on-site museum was built over the pit so that visitors could look down over railings at the rows of clay warriors and horses as well as at the processes of excavation of the site. Excavations have continued ever since, and three pits have been covered by on-site museums, attracting millions of visitors from all over the world. The mausoleum was listed as a World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization in 1987.

In spite of numerous new discoveries, archaeological theoretical interpretations during the Cultural Revolution were dry and dogmatic, an inevitable consequence of the political climate of the era. Tightly controlled foreign policies eliminated the exchange of information between China and western countries, and the only theoretical frameworks applicable at the time were Marxism and Maoism. Mortuary and settlement data obtained from many Neolithic sites were commonly used to support Morgan-Engels or Marxist-Leninist propositions such as the emergence of private property, class differentiation, the practice of matrilineal or patrilineal social organizations, and the formation of the state as the result of class conflict. In some publications, which were purely data descriptions, Marxist and Maoist slogans were routinely inserted into the contents but appeared superficial and far-fetched. The lack of fresh theoretical approaches prevented archaeologists from engaging in critical discussions, and the rapid accumulation of archaeological data also forced scholars to become preoccupied with constructing the sequence of material culture rather than with theoretical thinking about it. Chinese archaeology, therefore, largely remained artifact oriented.

Archaeology in the Post–Cultural Revolution Era (1978–)

After the Cultural Revolution, the relatively relaxed political atmosphere and the practice of