Xia Nai

Xia Nai the Chinese archaeologist (1910-1985) regarded as the founder of modern scientific archaeology in China, who introduced stratigraphic excavation and radiocarbon dating and directed pioneering work on prehistoric and Bronze Age sites. Through five decades of fieldwork, teaching and administration he helped to establish archaeology as an independent discipline, and his excavations of the Shang and Zhou remains set new standards of precision for the field.

Early Life and Education

Xia Nai was born on 19 February 1910 in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province. His father was a respected scholar and physician, and the family valued learning; the boy showed an early aptitude for languages and for the careful observation of objects. He attended secondary school in Shanghai and then entered the preparatory department of the University of Tsinghua, where he first encountered the new methods of Western historical scholarship.

He went on to study at the University of Manchester in England, one of the few places at the time where archaeology was taught with modern field techniques. He studied under the Egyptologist Stephen Glanville and wrote a doctoral thesis on the decomposition and dating of ancient Chinese bronzes, work that combined chemical analysis with archaeology and impressed his teachers with its rigour.

During these years he travelled widely in Europe and visited excavations and museums, absorbing the standards of stratigraphy, typology and careful recording that continental and British excavators had developed. He returned to China in 1941, determined to apply the same principles to the study of his own country's past.

Career and Fieldwork

During the 1940s Xia Nai took part in excavations in the northwest and in Gansu and Sichuan, work carried out under difficult wartime conditions, and he began to publish systematic reports that combined field observation with detailed analysis of pottery, bronze and burial practice. His careful records became models for younger scholars and helped to replace antiquarian collecting with controlled excavation.

After 1949 he helped to reorganise the country's archaeological institutions and became a leading figure in the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which he directed for many years. He was responsible for training a generation of excavators and for setting national standards in documentation, conservation and the reporting of finds. He also guided large salvage excavations undertaken during the great building projects of the 1950s and 1960s.

He never lost his attachment to fieldwork. Even when his administrative duties were heavy he returned to the trench and to the study of pottery sequences, and he insisted that theory must rest on securely recorded evidence rather than on speculation. This insistence gave his school of archaeology its distinctive empirical character.

Method and Scientific Innovation

Xia Nai is best remembered for bringing scientific methods into Chinese archaeology. He championed radiocarbon dating from the earliest days of the technique and worked to establish a laboratory in China that could date wood, charcoal and bone, linking Chinese prehistory to a worldwide chronological framework. His advocacy of measurable dating freed the study of the past from dependence on traditional literary records.

He applied stratigraphy, the reading of superimposed layers of soil, as the foundation of archaeological interpretation, and he refined the typological study of bronze vessels so that their forms and decorations could be used to establish sequences and to date sites. His analysis of the great Shang and Zhou cemeteries combined these methods with a wide command of classical texts, and his published reports became standard works of reference.

He was equally concerned with the conservation of excavated objects and with the ethics of excavation, arguing that sites should not be opened unless they could be properly recorded and their contents preserved. This doctrine of responsible archaeology, advanced at a time when resources were scarce, shaped the practice of the discipline for decades.

Major Sites and Written Works

Among the sites with which he was associated were the late Shang cemetery at Hougang near Anyang and the early Zhou remains at Shangcunling in Henan, where his excavations clarified the political and cultural transition from the Shang to the Zhou dynasty. He studied the bronzes, jades and ceramics of these sites in minute detail and used them to describe the development of ritual and craft.

He also investigated early sites in Gansu and Qinghai and helped to define several prehistoric cultures of the northwest, contributing to the chronological framework of the neolithic and the early metal ages. His synthesis of Chinese prehistory, based on excavated evidence rather than legend, remains a point of departure for later research.

His principal writings included detailed reports on the Anyang excavations and a series of influential studies of bronze technology, dating and the archaeology of the Han period. He wrote with economy and precision, and the breadth of his interests, from the neolithic to the medieval period, gave his work an unusual scope.

Influence and Legacy

Xia Nai trained many of the leading archaeologists of the following generation and held a range of scholarly and public offices, including membership of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the directorate of its Institute of Archaeology. He represented Chinese scholarship abroad and worked to maintain international contacts even during periods when such contacts were difficult.

He lived to see his methods become the common property of the field. The use of radiocarbon dating, the insistence on stratigraphic control and the combination of archaeological and textual evidence that he advocated are now taken for granted in Chinese archaeology, and his reports remain models of clear presentation.

He died on 19 June 1985 in Beijing. Colleagues remembered him as a scholar of immense energy and scrupulous honesty, equally at home in the trench and in the library, and as the man who gave Chinese archaeology its modern scientific foundation. His name is associated with the transformation of the study of the Chinese past from an antiquarian pursuit into a rigorous historical science.

See also

• Chinese archaeology
• Radiocarbon dating
• Anyang
• Institute of Archaeology