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Serials on Chinese Archaeology Published in the People's Republic of China: A Bibliographical Survey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2015

Lothar von Falkenhausen
Lothar von Falkenhausen*
Affiliation:
History of Art Dept., University of California, Riverside Riverside, CA 92521
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Type
Bibliography
Information
Early China , Volume 17 , 1992 , pp. 247 - 295
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Study of Early China 1992

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References

1. See Goodrich, David, “Recent Archaeological Publications in China,” Early China 8 (1982–1983), 162–169 Google Scholar.

2. The “serials” category includes both regularly and irregularly appearing jourals, as well as newsletters, gazettes and the like. Items of which only a single issue has been published are included when there are indications that they were intended to be part of an open-ended series. By contrast, multi-volume compilations with a pre-determined number of volumes are not considered as serials.

3. Through 1990, provincial-level archaeological institutes had been founded in every province with the exception of Tibet. They grew out of the archaeological teams [kaogudui 考古隊] attached to the provincial museums or the Provincial Commissions of Cultural Relics Administration [Wenwu guanli weiyuanhui 文物管理委員會, often abbreviated as Wenguanhui] that had been set up everywhere in the fifties. The split of field archaeology from the museums has led to some administrative friction over the control of archaeologically retrieved objects. Both the provincial museums and the provincial institutes of archaeology are placed under the administrative authority of the national-level State Bureau of Cultural Relics (Guojia wenwuju 國家文物局) in Beijing, which in turn is subordinate to the Ministry of Culture (Wenhuabu 文化部).

4. Characters for names of periodicals are given in the list of periodicals following this introductory section; characters are not included for names of institutions and common Chinese words and terms.

5. Two such reports have been published by Qilu Book Corporation [Qilu shushe] in Jinan: Qufu Luguo gucheng 曲阜魯國故城 (The ancient city of Lu at Qufu) in 1982 Google Scholar, and Linyi Fenghuangling Dong-Zhou mu 臨？斤風凰嶺東周墓 (The Eastern Zhou tombs at Fenghuangling, Linyi) in 1987 Google Scholar. In 1989, the Yanshan Publishing House [Yanshan chubanshe] in Beijing published the report on the 1955–1960 Google Scholar campaigns at Luoyang [Luoyang fajue baogao, 1955–1960 nian Luoyang Jianbin kaogu fajue ziliao 洛陽發掘報告, 1955–1960年洛陽澗濱考古發掘資料], compiled by the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. A Western Han tomb in Xi'an with important wall-paintings is to be published through Xi'an Jiaotong Daxue Press. While this trend is to be welcomed in principle because of the potentially increased output, the locally published archaeological reports are often very difficult to obtain, even in China.

6. The following cultural relics gazetteers have come to my attention: for Guangdong, those of Guangzhou city: Guangzhou shi wenwuzhi 廣州市文物志 (Guangzhou: Lingnan meishu chubanshe, 1990)Google Scholar, and Ding'an county: Ding'an xian wenwuzhi 定安縣文物志 (Guangzhou: Zhongshan daxue chubanshe, 1987)Google Scholar; for Hainan, the one for Wenchang county: Wenchang xian wenwuzhi 文昌縣文物志 (Wenchang: Wenchang xian zhengxie wenshi ziliao yanjiu weiyuanhui, 1988)Google Scholar, and for Shandong, the preliminary version for Zibo city: ( Zibo shi wenwuzhi [chugao] 溜博市文物志 [初稿]), published by its own editorial committee in 1984 Google Scholar. Unlike the two volumes from Guangdong, this one is neibu. A complete set of 47 wenwuzhi has been published for Jilin province, with one attractive 16m0 volume per county. This achievement has been cited as a model for other provinces. Unfortunately, these gazetteers are neibu, but they may some day be republished in official form (I have been able to obtain two: Ji'an xian wenwuzhi 輯安竊文物志, published in 1984, and Dongliao xian wenwuzhi 東遼縣文物志, published in ca. 1986, both with the Jilin Provincial Commission for Cultural Relics Gazetteers [Jilin sheng wenwuzhi bianweihui] figuring as the publisher). The guidelines for compiling and publishing these gazetteers apparently vary somewhat from province to province. Full-fledged county gazetteers have appeared in some places, and these in many cases contain a short section on cultural relics. For instance, in the 743-page gazetteer of Acheng county in Heilongjiang ( Acheng xianzhi 阿城縣志; Ha'erbin: Heilongjiang renmin chubanshe), that section occupies pp. 606–611 Google Scholar, plus four pages of color plates. As more and more gazetteers are published and classified, their availability and usefulness to the archaeologist will undoubtedly increase.

7. I have outlined some of these trends in a paper delivered at the American Anthropological Association meetings in Chicago on November 23, 1991, which I intend to revise for publication in the near future.

8. In this connection, one may wonder whether the fact that all of the “Three Great Journals” moved to increase their format and/or number of yearly volumes around the same time might have been a step taken in response to provincial concerns about backlogs, and in order to remove any necessity for regional archaeological publications. Even so, backlogs remain a serious problem.

9. The mimeographed journal Quanzhou wenwu (see 2.4.3.), which may have appeared since the late fifties, seems to have been mainly sponsored by and geared at overseas Chinese residing in that area and is thus somewhat atypical for a local archaeological journal, but Quanzhou wenshi, published since 1979, fits the pattern.

10. The emergence of a national-level journal devoted to the popularization of archaeology, Wenwu tiandi (see 1.3.6.), has taken some of the pressure off the regional publications to serve as a means of educating those administrators who lack a strong background in the field.

11. Due to exceedingly crammed conditions in the library's stacks, a number of items appear to have been misplaced. At the very end of my stay in Beijing, I was told that additional publications, some of them apparently not included in the library catalogue, had been placed in the research collections (ziliaoshi) of the Kaogusuo. At that time, it was already too late to take up this lead; I do not know according to what principle publications were assigned to either the library or to the ziliaoshi, respectively. There seem to be plans to consolidate the two as soon as a larger library is constructed.

12. An increasing amount of worthwhile scholarship is coming in the journals of universities and provincial academies of social sciences. These are more likely than the regional archaeological journals to be found in Western libraries, because they are often offered for exchange by their publishing institutions.

13. In doing so, I read through each article pertaining to Neolithic, Bronze Age, and Han archaeology, compiling rough abstracts along the way. I intend to polish and publish these abstracts in monographic form soon.

14. I have been able to collect a small number of regional serials. A listing of my personal holdings is available upon request.

15. The divergence of such a system of numbering periodicals from that current in the West has led to some awkwardness when these periodicals are cited by Western authors. In contrast to most Western periodicals, the notion of a “yearly volume” (the periodical installments within which are continuously paginated) is of little use with Chinese journals, where every issue is paginated separately (the only exceptions to this being Kaogu xuebao and Kaogu, which do provide continuous pagination throughout all issues published within a year). One sometimes sees citations such as “Wenwu 4 (1960),” meaning the fourth issue of Wenwu in the year 1960; this is misleading because 1960 was neither the fourth year in which that journal appeared, nor is the issue here referred to the fourth consecutive one of the journal starting from its inception. The citation system as used in Early China, in which the journal issue in question would be referred to as “Wenwu 1960.4” — some authors prefer “1960(4),” which makes no difference — is therefore to be recommended.