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(1895–1979)
Li Chi was born in Hubei province in china into a wealthy family. In 1918 he went to the United States to study psychology and sociology at Clark University in Massachusetts, and then to Harvard University, where he earned a Ph.D. in anthropology in 1923, after which he returned to China and taught at Nankai University.
Between 1925 and 1926 Li excavated a Neolithic Yangshao Culture site in southern Shanxi province, making him the first Chinese scholar to undertake modern archaeological fieldwork. In 1928 he became the first head of the department of archaeology at the Academia Sinica, established to excavate the three-thousand-year-old capital of the Shang culture at anyang. These excavations shaped modern archaeology in China through their recruitment and training of young Chinese archaeologists (including xia nai, later director of the Institute of Archaeology) and their use of modern field archaeology techniques in combination with traditional Chinese historiography and antiquarianism. The site also yielded oracle bone inscriptions that proved to be the first written documents in China, and the ceramic and bronze vessel nomenclature and typology used by Li at Anyang still dominates the archaeology of China. His book The Formation of Chinese People: An Anthropological Inquiry was published in 1928.
The Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and then World War II put an end to all archaeology in China. In 1949 Li went to Taiwan with the Nationalist government, and he did not work on mainland China again. He founded the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at National Taiwan University, the first university program in China to train professional archaeologists, and published his synthesis of archaeological and historic material The Beginnings of Chinese Civilization in 1957. Li spent most of his time on the conservation and publication of the Anyang material, which was completed as Anyang Excavations in 1977.
See also
(1908–1980)
Born in Colorado and raised in California, Willard Libby was a farmer’s son. He began studying mining engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1927 and changed to chemistry, which interested him more. He received a Ph.D. in 1933 after studying low-energy radioactive nuclei. From 1933 to 1941 he taught chemistry at Berkeley.
In 1941 Libby joined the Manhattan Project (the development of a nuclear bomb) at Columbia University in New York City, where he worked on gas diffusion techniques for separating uranium isotopes into fissionable material. In 1945 he became professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago and began working at the Institute of Nuclear Studies. It was here that Libby proved that the amount of radiocarbon in all living plants and animals begins to decay at death at a known rate—so that it would be possible to measure the amount of time since the organism has died by measuring the amount of radiocarbon remaining in it. The accuracy of this technique was tested by comparison with proven other dating techniques such as tree-ring dating, and the first actual C-14 dates appeared in 1949.
Radiocarbon dating revolutionized archaeology in the twentieth century. It began a new era—no longer did archaeologists have to spend so much time developing and testing chronologies for their material—they had an accurate method for dating any organic material from the last 70,000 years and they could now pursue other imperatives and new ideas and new directions in their discipline. In 1959 Libby became professor of chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles, and in 1960 he received the Nobel Prize for chemistry for his work on radiocarbon dating.
Libby was one of the United States’ major postwar nuclear scientists. In 1954 he was appointed by President Eisenhower to serve on the Atomic Energy Commission, the first chemist to do so. He was mainly interested in the effects of nuclear fallout and was also involved in international efforts for peaceful uses of nuclear power, serving as vice-chairman of the American delegation to the First International
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