Transforming History: The Making of a Modern Academic Discipline in Twentieth-Century China

11. Filling in the Nation: The Spatial Trajectory of Prehistoric Archaeology in Twentieth-Century China

Chapter 11 Filling in the Nation: The Spatial Trajectory of Prehistoric Archaeology in Twentieth-Century China* James Leibold The link between the modern science of archaeology and political nationalism has been well established within the academic literature, with a number of studies demonstrating how “archaeologists in the service of the state frequently have manipulated archaeological remains to justify the ownership of land claimed to have been held ‘from time immemorial’ or to support polices of domination and control over neighbouring peoples.”1 Perhaps less understood is the way in which prehistoric archaeology —and its related subdisciplines of paleontology, paleoanthropology, ethnoarchaeology, paleography, and others—are predicated on an epistemic revolution in time and space. Archaeology as a modern discipline came of age alongside the nationstate system: a global system of fully bounded and competing nationstates that serves as the only legitimate expression of political sovereignty. With the enclosure of space, borderlands were bordered and minorities were nationalized, as state elites set about constructing new narratives of national unfolding. Here archaeology had an important role to play, tracing the roots and origins of national cultures and peoples while weaving together intricate ethnogenealogies of shared descent and national belonging. Similarly, archaeology was born out of a revolution in time, as geologists pushed the frontiers of human history back into the miasma of * The author would like to thank Brian Moloughney, Peter Zarrow, Hon Tze-ki, Axel Schneider, and Tim Murray for their helpful suggestions and comments on earlier versions of this chapter, and Brian Moloughney and John Makeham for inviting me to participate in this project. 336 · James Leibold “deep time.”2 When James Hutton and Charles Lyell argued that the earth was much older than the creationists would have us believe and Charles Darwin suggested in 1859 that man evolved from apes some hundreds of millions of years ago, Western archaeologists were called on to fill in the gaps between prehistoric remains and modern civilization, stitching together a linear narrative of human progress free from the hands of God, while explaining the varied pace of different “races” toward the single light of modernity.3 As several have noted, in its modernist guise, prehistoric archaeology is essentially a form of historical ethnology—tracing the course of human development within the confines of bounded ethnic and cultural spaces.4 The intimate link among archaeology, space, and time is on display in Chinese classrooms today, where children are instructed in the prehistoric roots of their “ancestors.” Take for example the story of the nation included in a new history textbook recently trialled in Shanghai secondary schools. Here, fossil remains are used to authenticate both the temporal antiquity and spatial unity of the Chinese race/nation, or what the Chinese commonly refer to as the Zhonghua minzu 中華民族. The textbook begins by stating that China possesses the world’s greatest store of prehistoric fossils and lists the 1.7-million-year-old Yuanmou Man 元 謀人, 700,000- to 200,000-year-old Peking Man 北京猿人, and the 18,000-year-old Upper Cave Man 山頂洞人 as evidence of the antiquity and linear evolution of the Chinese people. A map (see figure 1) demonstrating the physical distribution of these prehistoric remains provides a powerful semiotic of the nation as bounded and singular. A colored box beside the map asks students: “What historical information can be drawn from the distribution of prehistoric human and major historical relics in China represented on the map to the right?” The answer is clear: the spatial and temporal unity of the Chinese geo-body.5 Much of the scholarship on the history and development of archaeology as an academic discipline in China has focused on its relationship to the writing of national history. Building on the rich tradition of Song antiquarianism, the 1910 discovery of “dragon bones” (longgu 龍骨) in the fields of Henan farmers allowed Chinese scholars to literally piece together the scrambled and incomplete narrative of the past contained in the ancient Chinese classics. In the hands of Luo Zhenyu 羅振玉 (1866– 1940), Wang Guowei 王國維 (1877–1927), and other classically trained scholars, the material remains dug out of the ground were used to empirically validate the linear chronology of national belonging first sketched Filling in the Nation · 337 out by Sima Qian 司馬遷 in the Shiji 史記 (Records of the Historian), while also shifting its focus from the political and moral transmission of dynastic ruler to the evolutionary struggle of a single Zhonghua nation/ race. Liang...