Chinese Archaeology as a Function of Politics

Before one can address the pressing questions within any discipline, it is worth investigating the narratives and assumptions that undergird the answers. In Chinese archaeology, there have been observable points in time where politics have exerted significant force on academic opinions - certain political epochs correspond to homogeneity in opinion. This begs the question: in the context of Chinese archaeology, how exactly has politics affected archaeological interpretations of discoveries and theoretical frameworks? Within the modern era, I look to three major eras that have well-documented effects on Chinese archaeology to chart the changes in the discipline over time: 1) the Republican era, 2) the Maoist era, and 3) the post-reform period (i.e., 1978 and onwards). In interpreting these broad eras and the political views that characterize them, I will appeal to Michel Foucault’s concept of the episteme. That is, the underlying assumptions that ground the way people understand the world and their surroundings. I find that, regardless of what political narratives become dominant, nationalism is always a core fixture of these interpretations. Further, I also find that nationalism did not appear as a spontaneous phenomenon but served a very specific purpose: to counter the Western colonization of the discipline.