When Archaeology Begins: The Cultural and Political Context of Chinese Archaeological Thought

Since the beginning of the 19th century, the construction of world history has been dominated by Western Europe. In Jack Goody’s recent work, The Theft of History (2007), he demonstrates that the interpretation of the past is conceptualized and presented according to what happened in Europe, and more often in Western Europe. Chinese archaeology, under the control of Western imperialism in the early 20th century, believed that it had to destroy Confucianism and come up with a new philosophy. However, with the arrival of many different kinds of western ideas, such as evolution and diffusion, Chinese archaeology was reformulated many times. Such issues have been discussed in several publications (Chen 1997; Liu and Chen 1999; Falkenhausen 1993). In this paper, we reexamine some of the key concepts of Chinese archaeological thought.