FP | Blatant ideological bias faded from scientific endeavors in the
post-1978 reform era, but the ultimate goal of Chinese archaeology — to
piece out the nation’s history — remained. The best-known example from
that era is the Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project, directly inspired by
the achievements of Egyptian archaeology. State Councilor Song Jian
toured Egypt in 1995 and was particularly impressed by a genealogy of
the pharaohs that went back to the third millennium B.C. This prompted
him to campaign for a project — included in the government’s ninth
five-year plan — that would give Chinese dynasties a comparable record.
Mobilizing over 200 experts on a budget of around $1.5 million over five
years, the Chronology Project has been considered the largest
state-sponsored project in the humanities since 1773, when the Qianlong
emperor commissioned the Siku quanshu, an encyclopedia roughly 20 times the length of the Britannica.
Some questioned the Chronology Project’s motives. One of the most
prominent detractors was University of Chicago historian Edward L.
Shaughnessy, who complained,
“There’s a chauvinistic desire to push the historical record back into
the third millennium B.C., putting China on a par with Egypt. It’s much
more a political and a nationalistic urge than a scholarly one.” Others
criticized the project’s methods and results. The Stanford archaeologist
Li Liu, for instance, took issue
with the fact that it regarded the Xia as historical and fixed dates
for it, when there is still no conclusive archaeological evidence for
its existence.
But the project also had defenders, including Harvard anthropologist Yun Kuen Lee, who pointed out
that “the intrinsic relationship between the study of the past and
nationalism does not necessarily imply that the study of the past is
inherently corrupted.” The usefulness of archaeology in bolstering a
nation’s pride and legitimacy — explaining and, to some extent,
justifying its language, culture, and territorial claims — means that
most archaeological traditions have a nationalistic impulse behind them.
Thus, in Israel, archaeology focuses on the period of the Old
Testament; in the Scandinavian countries, it focuses on that of the
Vikings. “The important question that we should ask,” Yun went on to
say, “is if the scientists of the project were able to maintain
scientific rigor.”
In some ways, Sun’s current theory is an unintended result of the Chronology Project’s scientific rigor.
At the project’s launch in 1996, he was a Ph.D. student in the
radiation laboratory of the University of Science and Technology. Of the
200 or so items of bronze ware he was responsible for analyzing, some
came from the city of Yin. He found that the radioactivity of these
Yin-Shang bronzes had almost exactly the same characteristics as that of
ancient Egyptian bronzes, suggesting that their ores all came from the
same source: African mines.
Perhaps anticipating serious controversy, Sun’s doctoral supervisor
did not allow Sun to report his findings at the time. Sun was asked to
hand over his data and switched to another project. Twenty years after
the start of his research and now a professor in his own right, Sun is
finally ready to say all he knows about the Yin-Shang and China’s Bronze Age culture.
Although the public has mostly received Sun’s theory with an open
mind, it still lies outside the academic mainstream. Since the 1990s,
most Chinese archaeologists have accepted that much of the nation’s
Bronze Age technology came from regions outside of China. But it is not
thought to have arrived directly from the Middle East in the course of
an epic migration. The more prosaic consensus is that it was transmitted
into China from Central Asia by a slow process of cultural exchange
(trade, tribute, dowry) across the northern frontier, mediated by
Eurasian steppe pastoralists who had contacts with indigenous groups in
both regions.
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