South Korean Archaeology after 1945

After the defeat of Japan in 1945, the Korean Peninsula was divided into southern and northern halves by the Allied forces. In South Korea, which was controlled by the U.S. forces, the newly founded National Museum in Seoul started archaeological activities in 1946 with the excavation of a Silla tomb in Kyongju. Kim Jae-won was appointed as the first director of the museum. He had received his postgraduate education in archaeology in Europe during the colonial era, but he had no experience of excavation in Korea. Excavations of tombs of the historical period continued, but the museum’s work was soon halted by the outbreak of the Korean War (1950–1953).

In the 1950s, the National Museum and a few university museums excavated prehistoric and historical sites of various kinds. The people who participated in the excavations include some of the first generation of Korean archaeologists, such as Jin Hong-seop, Yun Mu-byeong, Kim Won-yong, and Kim Jeok-hak, most of whom had no formal training in archaeology. However, the organization of an exhibition of Korean art that toured major museums in the United States and Europe between 1958 and 1960 resulted in limited archaeological excavation because of the limited number of museum staff members who were available for fieldwork.

In 1961, the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology was established at Seoul National University, and Kim Won-yong, who had recently received his Ph.D. from New York University, became the senior member of the faculty, marking a new era of formal education in Korean archaeology. A doyen of Korean archaeology, Kim Won-yong played the most significant role in training young archaeologists and establishing the basics of Korean prehistory and art history. Graduates from this department have become the major players in Korean archaeology and art history as professors in universities, curators in national and private museums, and bureaucrats in government offices in charge of managing cultural properties.

During the 1960s and 1970s, most archaeological fieldwork was conducted by university museums, the National Museum, and the newly established Institute of Cultural Properties. Excavations of two royal tombs of Silla, the Tomb of Heavenly Horse and the Great Tomb of Hwangnam, in Kyongju and the discovery of the Tomb of King Muryeong, the only intact royal tomb of a great king of Baekje, in Gongju, were of great significance during this period. In addition, the first examples of Acheulean hand-axes in East Asia were discovered in Jeongokni. A Neolithic shell midden site at Yeoncheon in Busan, and a number of Bronze-Age settlement and burial sites were excavated, all of which filled significant gaps in Korea’s prehistory.

One of the major accomplishments of Korean archaeology during this period was to overcome the colonial legacy of Japanese archaeologists. In both North and South Korea, archaeologists discovered a number of Paleolithic sites that confirmed a long sequence of cultural development on Korean Peninsula. They also proved that the Japanese interpretation of the so-called Chalcolithic age was wrong by confirming the existence of Neolithic and Bronze Ages in successive chronological order. As archaeological data accumulated, it became apparent that the Korean Peninsula was neither a backward nor a stagnant area of prehistoric cultural development, as the Japanese scholars had tried to portray it. On the contrary, newly discovered archaeological data in both Korea and Japan suggested that the major sources of stimulus for new cultural development in the Yayoi and Kofun periods of Japan were often the ancient societies of the Korean Peninsula.

Since the 1980s, enormous economic development has caused the destruction of numerous archaeological sites, and in order to protect the cultural heritage, legal codes were revised to require mandatory archaeological fieldwork before public and private construction projects could begin. In an attempt to meet the increasing demand for archaeological fieldwork, a number of new archaeological institutions for cultural resource management (CRM) were launched. These institutions took much of the CRM burden from the university museums, which had conducted most of the archaeological excavations until the 1980s. In order to cope with the changing environment of archaeological