Theory and methods of settlement archaeology–the Chinese contribution

Abstract

On the international stage, discussions on theoretical and methodological aspects of settlement archaeology tend to be dominated by Anglo-American scholarship associated with the emergence of the New Archaeology’s systemic view of culture and its ecological outlook in which settlement pattern analysis became a crucial approach. Few people are aware that a scholar of Chinese origin, K.C. Chang, contributed substantially to these debates already since the 1950s and introduced western practices of settlement archaeology to China in the 1980s. Since then, numerous international collaborative projects in China have provided a fruitful basis for an exchange of ideas between different scholarly traditions and providing opportunities for methods developed in the West to be tested in a different cultural and environmental context. The present paper traces these developments, highlighting the extent of the Chinese contributions and concluding with some thoughts on the standing of Chinese archaeology within the field of archaeology worldwide.