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Zou Heng

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Zou Heng (Chinese: 邹衡, January 30, 1927 – 2005) was a Chinese archaeologist.

Biography

Early life and education

Zou was born on January 30, 1927 in the Yonghe village of Li County, Hunan. He entered primary school late, enrolling at age eight. Following the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, he became a refugee. He attended eight different middle schools, eventually graduating from the National Middle School in Santai County, Sichuan, in 1946. He enrolled in Peking University as a law student the following year, but transferred to the History department during the Chinese Civil War, recognizing that the nascent Communist government would replace the Republic's law codes.[1]

After graduating in 1952, Zou was admitted as the sole graduate student of the university's nascent archaeology program. His advisors during this period included Su Bingqi and Zhang Zhenglang. He entered a one-year archaeological training course at Luoyang, and the following year served as a supervisor during the excavation of the Han tombs at Shaogou. After this, he worked at the Erligang site under Pei Wenzhong. He reconstructed a number of pottery vessels from sherds, a relatively new technique in Chinese archaeology. In 1954, he taught his first class, covering Shang and Zhou bronzes, as part of an archaeological workers' training program. He would later contribute to the official report on the Erligang excavations.[2] In 1955, he graduated from Peking University, becoming the first person to earn a Doctoral Candidate degree (equivalent to a PhD) in archaeology since the foundation of the People's Republic. He spent the next year teaching history at Lanzhou University and the Northwestern Normal Institute, and was appointed as a lecturer at his alma mater.[3]

Academic career and persecution

During the late 1950s, he came under increasing government scrutiny during the Anti-Rightist Campaign, but was able to avoid persecution and continue his teaching despite years of government monitoring. Over the following years he supervised undergraduate training excavations at various locations in Hebei, Henan, and Beijing, ranging from the Neolithic period to the Liao dynasty. He took particular interest in the Liulihe site in southern Beijing, which he had first visited in 1962, identifying it with the ancient capital of the Yan state.[3]

Zou's work at Liulihe was interrupted by a wave of academic repression during the Cultural Revolution. He was subject to a number of struggle sessions due to past suspicions of political insubordination. On one occasion, a group of his students allegedly beat him. He was sent to rural Jiangxi in 1969 to work as a poultry farmer. He was allowed to return around a year and a half later, and continued excavations at Liulihe from 1972 to 1974. During this time, he successfully saved the site from being cleared to make way for farmland as part of the "Learn from Dazhai in agriculture" campaign. In 1973, he was sent to the rural suburbs of Beijing for some time. Despite political persecution, he continued his academic work in secret during the heights of the Cultural Revolution. He refused to evacuate from his apartment following the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, unwilling to lose access to his personal library. He published various major works immediately after the end of the revolution.[3] Zou was then quickly promoted, obtained an associate professorship at Peking University in 1979. He returned to teaching courses on Shang and Zhou archaeology.[4]

Shang Zhou Kaogu

From March 1976 to May 1977, Zou wrote an archaeological textbook entitled the Shang Zhou Kaogu (Chinese: 商周考古; lit. 'Shang and Zhou Archaeology'). The textbook was based off course material compiled by Zou in the 1950s for his early archaeological classes at Peking, itself derived from training materials from his predecessor Guo Baojun. Earlier attempts were made to revise the material in 1960 and 1972 (the latter in collaboration with Li Boqian), but these were never put to print for unknown reasons, instead serving as bases for the 1977 edition. Zou was not named as the author of the book due to the significant contribution from earlier archaeologists. The Shang Zhou Kaogu reached national prominence, and was considered an authoritative textbook as late as the mid-2000s.[4][5]

Later archaeological career

From 1979 to 1994, he spent much of his time supervising excavations at the Zhou-era Tianma-Qucun site, in collaboration with the Institute of Archaeology of Shanxi Province. In 1983, he was promoted to a full professorship. The same year, he was invited by Chinese-American sinologist Kwang-chih Chang to teach as a Yenching scholar at Harvard University. He stayed at Harvard for 8 months, and taught a seminar on Bronze Age China alongside Chang and Chinese University of Hong Kong professor Lin Shoujin. During the 1980s, he traveled abroad extensively, and frequently visited collections of early Chinese art in other countries.[4]

The looting of archaeological sites by armed gangs spread rapidly across China during the late 1980s. Zou continued his work at Tianma-Qucun despite frequent death threats, often working as the only official at the site. Looting activities continued despite government crackdowns; the nearby Jin royal cemetery at Beizhao was discovered and plundered in 1992, continuing during the subsequent official excavations. In 1989, Zou ceased field duties to focus on documenting artifacts recovered from Tianma-Qucun. His former student Li Boqian assumed leadership over operations at the site.[6][4]

After completing the documentation and periodization of the Tianma-Qucun artifacts, Zou worked from 1994 to 1996 to compile the report for the excavations alongside junior researchers Liu Xu, Sun Hua, and Xu Tianjin. He spent most of his time at Peking University's Shang-Zhou archaeology office on the second floor of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, sleeping on a cot in the office during the workweek. He was pressured to retirement in 1996; four years later, the report was published by Science Press in a four-volume work entitled Tianma-Qucun 1980–89, then the largest archaeologist publication ever published in the People's Republic.[6][7]

Zou was awarded the National Museum of Asian Art's Shimada Prize in 2001 for his work at Tianma-Qucun, but was unable to attend the award ceremony due to the September 11 attacks.[6][8] In 2003, a large two-volume Festschrift was published in his honor. One article within the text, submitted under the name of his son Zou Xiaotian, was found to have been written by Zou himself; the article aggressively criticized rival archaeologist Li Boqian due to his work under the Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project.[7]

Zou was diagnosed with cancer in 2004. He published his last article in April 2005, a submission to the Huaxia Kagou criticizing the official interpretations of the Zhengzhou Shang City. His health entered a steep declined after attending a conference on the archaeological effects of the South–North Water Transfer Project that October. After an unsuccesful operation, he died in Beijing on December 27, 2005.[7]

References

  1. ^ von Falkenhausen 2006, pp. 181–182.
  2. ^ von Falkenhausen 2006, pp. 182–183.
  3. ^ a b c von Falkenhausen 2006, pp. 183–184.
  4. ^ a b c d von Falkenhausen 2006, pp. 184–186.
  5. ^ Thorp, Robert (1981). "The Chinese Bronze Age from a Marxist Perspective". Early China. 6. ISSN 0362-5028. JSTOR 23351658.
  6. ^ a b c "The Shimada Prize". National Museum of American Art. Retrieved June 29, 2024.
  7. ^ a b c von Falkenhausen 2006, pp. 187–188.
  8. ^ von Falkenhausen 2006, pp. 186–187.

Works cited


  • Xu, Jay. “The Cemetery of the Western Zhou Lords of Jin.” Artibus Asiae 56, no. 3/4 (1996): 193–231. https://doi.org/10.2307/3250117.
  • Xu, Hong, and Hong Xu. "Three Generations of Capitals." Dynamic Interpretation of Early Cities in Ancient China (2021): 117-211.
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