Su Bingqi

Su Bingqi a Chinese archaeologist of the twentieth century (1909-1997), one of the founders of modern Chinese archaeology and the principal architect of a new framework for understanding the origins of Chinese civilisation. He directed major excavations and proposed an influential theory of the multiple regional origins from which Chinese culture arose.

Early Life and Education

Su Bingqi was born in 1909 in Gaoyang, in Hebei province, into a family of modest circumstances. He showed academic promise as a boy and was able to continue his education despite the financial constraints of the time, eventually entering university in the early years of the Republic.

He studied at Beijing Normal University and then at the newly established department of archaeology at Peking University, where he was among the first students to be trained in the discipline in China. He learned the methods of field excavation and the study of artefacts, and he was drawn to the prehistory of the Chinese north.

He was a member of the generation that built Chinese archaeology from its beginnings, combining the classical historical education of the older tradition with the techniques and questions of the new science. His early fieldwork on the prehistoric cultures of northern China established him as one of the most capable archaeologists of the day.

Excavation and Prehistoric Research

Su Bingqi took part in and directed numerous excavations of Neolithic and Bronze Age sites, and his careful reports on these investigations became models of archaeological publication. He studied the material culture of the prehistoric communities of the north, analysing their pottery, tools, dwellings and burial customs in order to reconstruct their way of life and their development over time.

His work was characterised by a rigorous attention to stratigraphy and to the classification of artefacts, and he helped to establish the methods by which the relative chronology of prehistoric cultures could be determined from the layers of a site. He used typological analysis to trace the diffusion and transformation of pottery styles across regions and periods.

He also studied the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age and the emergence of the early states, and he contributed to the understanding of the chalcolithic cultures of the northern frontier and their relations with the central plain. His research laid much of the groundwork for the modern account of Chinese prehistory.

The Multiple Origins of Chinese Civilisation

Su Bingqi's most influential contribution was his theory of the multiple origins of Chinese civilisation. Against the older view that civilisation had arisen at a single centre and spread outward, he argued that a number of distinct regional cultures had developed in parallel across what is now China, each with its own trajectory, and that Chinese civilisation had formed through the interaction and eventual integration of these regional traditions.

He proposed a framework in which the prehistoric cultures of the various regions could be grouped into a small number of major cultural zones, each rooted in a particular environmental setting, and he traced the processes by which they came into contact, competed and combined. The origins of a unified Chinese culture were, on this account, the outcome of a long process of convergence among many centres rather than the expansion of a single one.

The theory transformed the interpretation of Chinese prehistory. It gave a coherent explanation of the archaeological diversity of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, and it provided a positive account of how the Chinese cultural sphere had come into being. It became one of the most widely accepted frameworks in the field and shaped a generation of research.

Method, Theory and the Discipline

Su Bingqi was concerned throughout his career with the methodological foundations of archaeology. He wrote on the principles of stratigraphy and typology, on the construction of regional cultural sequences and on the relation between archaeological and historical evidence, and he insisted that the discipline must rest on a firm empirical base.

He was also interested in the theoretical questions raised by the archaeology of early society, including the emergence of social inequality, the formation of states and the nature of the Chinese cultural tradition. He argued that archaeology had a contribution to make to the understanding of social development, and that the Chinese evidence was of world significance for the study of early complex societies.

He took part in the institutional development of the discipline, helping to organise research programmes and to train the next generation of archaeologists. His combination of practical fieldwork, methodological reflection and theoretical ambition exemplified the range that the new discipline demanded, and his students carried his approach into universities and research institutes throughout the country.

Influence and Legacy

Su Bingqi is honoured as one of the founding figures of Chinese archaeology. His excavations and reports established standards of evidence and documentation, and his theory of multiple origins provided the framework within which Chinese prehistory has been understood and investigated. His influence on the field was both practical and conceptual.

He trained many of the leading archaeologists of the following generation, and the questions he posed about the formation of Chinese civilisation continue to define research agendas in China and abroad. His work helped to demonstrate the importance of the Chinese archaeological record to the global study of the origins of civilisation.

He died in 1997. He is remembered as a scholar who combined a craftsman's care for the physical evidence with a historian's ambition to explain the largest questions of human development, and whose vision of Chinese civilisation as the achievement of many regions transformed the way the Chinese past is understood.

See also

• Chinese archaeology
• Neolithic China
• Origins of Chinese civilization
• Wang Zhongshu