The news capped a banner 12 months for Chinese archaeology. In March, archaeologists uncovered over 500 relics from the mysterious Sanxingdui culture in what is now the southwestern Sichuan province. In September, a team led by David Dian Zhang published a paper detailing an even more remarkable find from the Tibetan Plateau: the world’s oldest immobile artwork, 140,000 years older than France’s Chauvet cave paintings.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of Johan Gunnar Andersson’s 1921 excavation of the Neolithic Yangshao site, widely recognized as the starting point of Chinese archaeology. That makes the field a relative upstart, especially compared to China’s rich traditions of historiography and epigraphy, but it hasn’t kept archaeology from becoming one of the country’s most important academic fields over the past century.
