Recent archaeology in China - Brief Article

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 1999 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

At the turn of this century, scholars from all over the globe (France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, Russia, Sweden, the United States, and elsewhere), traveled to China, some to collaborate with Chinese archaeologists and others to unearth and plunder five thousand years of buried treasures. By mid-century political and social upheavals had all but ended archaeological excavations. However, in 1950 archaeology became a state-regulated enterprise, and work resumed at a modest but steady pace. In the 1970s, the Chinese were ready to show their archaeological finds, and to this end organized large loan exhibitions that captivated American viewers. One of the most extensive of these was The Exhibition of Archaeological Finds of the People's Republic of China, organized in 1974 and 1975 by the Chinese, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. Today, twenty-five years later, with much international collaboration and funding from the Chinese government, archaeology in China has made great advances. The fruits of these excavations - more than 175 splendid objects-have been brought together in a traveling show entitled The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People's Republic of China, which is on view at the National Gallery until January 2, 2000. It then travels to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (February 13 through May 7, 2000), and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco (June 17 through September 11, 2000). The exhibition is sponsored by Eastman Kodak Company, and the guest curator is Xiaoneng Yang, who is the curator of Chinese art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

The objects on view date from 5000 B.C. to A.D. 924, and about one hundred of them were unearthed in the 1980s and 1990s. There is extraordinary variety and artistic sophistication to be found among the jades, lacquer wares, silks, ceramics, gold and silver objects, and terracotta, wood, and bronze sculptures included in the exhibition.

Much of China's early history has been reevaluated as a result of the archaeological discoveries. Many of the foreign professionals who worked in China earlier in this century brought their finds home with them, and, as a result, thousands of prehistoric and early historic artifacts have found their way into institutions like the British Museum in London, Musee Guimet in Paris, and Fogg Art Museum and Arthur M. Sackler Museum, both at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The foreign archaeologists concentrated on the Yellow River valley and in northern China, because they were working under the erroneous premise that Chinese culture developed as man migrated from the West to the East. Today we know that prehistoric civilizations developed simultaneously in many locations in China, and that at least late prehistoric cultures existed in the vicinity of the Yangzi River in the south, where they cultivated rice, and at more remote locales in northeastern China.

In the 1980s and 1990s Su Bingqi (1909-1997), the founding chairman of the archaeology department at Beijing University, aided by the latest scientific equipment, divided early China into at least six major independent cultures and proposed that archaic cities and archaic states emerged during the Late Prehistoric period (c. 5000-1900 B.C.).

Today there are more than one thousand professionals working in academic and archaeological institutions in China. Many were trained in universities that have modeled their anthropology departments on those in the United States. This exhibition and its catalogue provide a rich history of early Chinese culture and the evolution of archaeology over the last one hundred years.

The catalogue of the exhibition contains contributions by more than two dozen scholars and is edited by Xiaoneng Yang. It is available from the National Gallery of Art Shops by telephoning 301-322-5900 or 800687-9350.