兩篇論文的學術分工
論文一（適投 Journal of the History of Science / History and
Theory）：以物質文化史、身體知識傳遞、情感史三個框架分析夏鼐個案，核心論點是日記作為認識論記錄的獨特價值——串珠卡片作為認知裝置、梅登堡的身體訓練、「自慚自恨」的情感結構、論文完成與中秋明月的文化語境。
論文二（適投 Past & Present / Comparative Studies in
Society and History）：以新帝國史框架，對夏鼐、桑卡利亞、曾昭燏三案進行系統性比較，論證知識流動的多向性、帝國知識體系的內部異質性，以及「直接殖民移植」（惠勒在印度）與「本土自主轉化」（夏鼐、桑卡利亞）兩種模式的長期效果差異。
Beads, Bodies, and Buried Feelings:
Material Knowledge, Embodied Training,
and the Emotional Life
of an Archaeologist: Xia Nai in Britain
and Egypt, 1935–1943
[Author name redacted for blind review]
[Institutional affiliation redacted for blind review]
Submitted to: Journal
of the History of Science / History and Theory
This article draws on
the diary of Chinese archaeologist Xia Nai (夏鼐, 1910–1985) — kept continuously
from his departure for Britain in 1935 to the completion of his doctoral
dissertation in wartime China in 1943 — to illuminate three underexplored
dimensions of archaeological knowledge production: (1) the material
infrastructure of research (the index card, the bead corpus, the field notebook
as cognitive devices); (2) the embodied transmission of field techniques
through Wheeler's Maiden Castle training; and (3) the emotional registers
through which a non-Western scholar navigated the affective demands of exile,
wartime anxiety, and intellectual formation. Situating Xia Nai within the
frameworks of history of science, material culture studies, and the emerging
history of emotions, the article argues that the private diary constitutes an
irreplaceable epistemological record — preserving the tactile, affective, and
improvisational dimensions of knowledge-making that formal publications
systematically conceal. The article further contends that Xia Nai's completion
of his Egyptian bead corpus (1943) while simultaneously conducting Chinese
field archaeology represents a 'parallel processing' of knowledge traditions
rarely acknowledged in histories of the discipline.
Keywords:
Xia Nai; history of
archaeology; material culture; embodied knowledge; history of emotions; Egypt;
China; index cards; typology; Maiden Castle
I. Introduction: The Diary as Epistemological Record
On 14 September 1943, in a
wartime academic compound at Lǐzhuāng (李莊), a village in Sichuan province to
which the Academia Sinica had evacuated its research institutes, the Chinese
archaeologist Xia Nai (夏鼐, 1910–1985) wrote the following entry in his diary:
將論文修改完竣，該年來心愿，至此作一結束，殊為欣快。今日中秋節，晚間在凌纯聲先生處作牌戲，散局後至牌坊頭，明月中天，將月光下的景物變成銀世界，令人低徊不忍遽舍。（The
thesis revision is complete. The wish of this whole year comes to its
conclusion here — I feel genuinely delighted. Today is the Mid-Autumn Festival.
This evening I played mahjong at Professor Ling Chunsheng's. After the game we
strolled to the memorial archway, and the full moon hung in the sky, turning
everything beneath it into a silver world, making one reluctant to leave.)
With characteristic
understatement, Xia Nai recorded the completion of what would become, when
eventually published seventy-one years later as Ancient Egyptian Beads
(Springer, 2014), the single most comprehensive typological study of Egyptian
bead assemblages ever produced. The two sentences — one registering
intellectual satisfaction, the other dissolving immediately into moonlight and
mahjong — exemplify the particular texture of the diary as a historical source:
its refusal of the triumphalist narrative, its juxtaposition of scholarly
achievement and domestic sociability, its embedding of major intellectual
events in the granular flow of everyday life.
This article treats the
diary of Xia Nai, covering the period from his departure for Britain in 1935
through the completion of his thesis in 1943, as a primary source for three
overlapping analytical projects. The first concerns the material infrastructure
of knowledge production: the index cards, bead specimens, field notebooks, and
institutional spaces through which Xia Nai assembled and systematised his
research. The second concerns embodied knowledge transmission: the ways in
which Mortimer Wheeler's Maiden Castle field school in 1936 inscribed
stratigraphic method into the body as much as into the mind, producing a form
of tacit knowledge that formal publications cannot adequately convey. The third
concerns the emotional history of scholarship in extremis: how Xia Nai's
affective responses to wartime dislocation, physical illness, national
emergency, and intellectual isolation shaped — rather than merely accompanied —
the production of archaeological knowledge.
Together, these three
analytical threads converge on a broader argument: that the history of
archaeology, like the history of science more generally, has been distorted by
its reliance on formal publications as the primary evidentiary record. The
private diary, the laboratory notebook, the field journal — sources that
historians of science have increasingly foregrounded since the archival turn —
offer access to the contingent, improvisational, and emotionally saturated
processes through which knowledge is actually made. In the case of Xia Nai, the
diary is all the more valuable because it bridges two languages (Chinese and
English), two disciplinary traditions (Egyptology and Chinese archaeology), and
two historical crises (World War II and the Second Sino-Japanese War)
simultaneously.
II. The Index Card as Cognitive Technology: Making the Bead Corpus
2.1 The Material Apparatus of Typology
Historians of science have
devoted increasing attention to what Lorraine Daston has called 'scientific
objects' — the material things that make certain kinds of knowledge possible
and others impossible. Ann Blair's work on the note-taking practices of early
modern scholars, Anke te Heesen's study of the index card as an information
technology, and Alberto Cevolini's edited volume on the art of forgetting and
the rise of epistemological infrastructure have collectively established that
the tools of knowledge organisation are not neutral conduits but active shapers
of what can be known and how it can be known.
Xia Nai's bead index — 1,760
cards, each recording the registration number, provenance, date, material, use,
arrangement, and typological classification of a single string of ancient
Egyptian beads from the Petrie Collection at University College London — is a
remarkable specimen of this material epistemology. The diary records the
creation of this apparatus with almost daily precision from May 1938, when he
began the project at Glanville's suggestion, through September 1943, when the
thesis incorporating the corpus was completed in Sichuan.
What the diary reveals, and
what the published thesis cannot, is the intense physicality of the card-making
process. Entries from 1938 record '整理串珠卡片達No.600' (cards completed up to
no. 600); from 1939, '每日僅能作50號，工作甚緩，奈何！奈何！' (I can only complete 50
numbers per day, the work is very slow — what can be done!). The repeated
exclamation — 奈何 — registers not frustration with the intellectual challenge
but with the physical pace of a hand-copying operation that required him to work
through over 1,700 specimens, one by one, across five years and three
countries.
2.2 Displacement and the Travelling Archive
The cards themselves became
a logistical problem of striking historical irony. When Xia Nai left London in
December 1937 for Egypt, the cards remained at UCL. When he returned to London
in 1938 and began the systematic corpus work, the cards accumulated in his
rented room. When war broke out in September 1939 and UCL's archaeology
department suspended operations, he had to decide which materials to transport
to Cairo. The diary records the anxiety of archival triage: which notes could
be trusted to the post, which photographs were irreplaceable, which typological
indexes would need to be reconstructed from memory if lost.
By 1942, portions of the
bead documentation had travelled with Xia Nai from London to Cairo to Calcutta
to Rangoon to Kunming to Chongqing to Lǐzhuāng — a journey of nearly 15,000
kilometres across three continents and two war theatres. The diary entry for 30
October 1943 records:
余托曾君赴渝之便，將余之英文論文設法由外交部航郵寄往英國，庶幾此事告一段落。（I
entrusted [Zeng Zhaoyu] with sending my English thesis by airmail through the
Foreign Ministry when she travels to Chongqing — hoping this will finally bring
the matter to a close.)
The physical routing of the
thesis manuscript through the Chinese Foreign Ministry's airmail channel —
itself an improvised wartime communication infrastructure — encapsulates the
extraordinary institutional fragility within which Xia Nai completed research
that would be cited, when finally published in 2014, in studies of African and
Near Eastern bead assemblages from sites thousands of miles from Egypt.
2.3 Classification as Intellectual Labour
The typological
classification system Xia Nai developed for the Egyptian bead corpus was not
adopted wholesale from Petrie or from his immediate predecessors (Beck,
Brunton, Reisner) but constructed through a sustained critical evaluation of
their methods. The diary records this theoretical work in tandem with the
physical card-making: entries from 1942–43 note where he rejects Beck's
material-based classification in favour of a system that combines material
group with the distinction between decorated and undecorated forms, and where
he disagrees with Brunton's dating of specific assemblages.
UCL's Stephen Quirke, in his
preface to the 2014 published edition, noted that the thesis was 'so
successful' that it 'deterred anyone from simply repeating what for many others
would amount to a lifetime of work' — explaining, in part, the seventy-one-year
publication gap. The diary allows us to see this achievement not as the product
of exceptional individual genius but as the outcome of a specific material
practice: daily, disciplined, card-by-card accumulation of evidence across five
years of war, displacement, illness, and competing professional obligations.
III. The Body in the Trench: Embodied Knowledge at Maiden Castle
3.1 Wheeler's Field School and the Transmission of Tacit Knowledge
In August 1936, Xia Nai
spent six weeks as a volunteer excavator at Mortimer Wheeler's dig at Maiden
Castle, the Iron Age hillfort in Dorset. The diary entries from this period
constitute the most technically detailed field record he left from any single
excavation — a density that itself signals the exceptional importance he
attributed to the experience. What the entries reveal is that Wheeler's
training operated simultaneously at three levels: the conceptual (stratigraphy
as a theoretical principle), the procedural (the systematic method of recording
layer sequences, section drawings, and find distributions), and the bodily (how
to hold a trowel, how to read soil colour changes, how to decide when to call
the finds supervisor).
The diary records his active
pursuit of maximum exposure to different parts of the site: '今日要求換區工作——以求得新經驗'
(today I requested a change of area — to gain new experience). This is the
behaviour not of a passive recipient of instruction but of a self-directed
learner actively managing his own curriculum. The phrase 'new experience' (新經驗)
recurs throughout the Maiden Castle entries with the specific meaning of bodily
familiarity with different soil conditions, different deposit types, different
stratigraphic configurations.
3.2 The Clinometer, the Section Drawing, and Precision as Discipline
The diary's technical
specificity at Maiden Castle goes well beyond general descriptions of field
method. Xia Nai records learning to use the clinometer (測斜儀) for precise
section drawing, working at a scale of half an inch to one foot, applying
levelling instruments to establish absolute height relationships between
stratigraphic deposits, and distinguishing the 'compact' from the 'loose' fills
of Neolithic ditches by physical touch as well as visual inspection.
This last point —
distinguishing soil consistency by touch — is of particular interest for the
history of embodied knowledge. Michael Polanyi's concept of tacit knowledge,
subsequently elaborated by Harry Collins into a sociology of scientific
expertise, rests precisely on the claim that certain forms of competence cannot
be adequately conveyed through explicit instruction but require bodily
habituation through practice. Xia Nai's diary entries suggest that he
understood this distinction intuitively: he repeatedly notes when a technique
has been 'learned' (學會) versus when it has been 'seen' (見到) or 'read about'
(閱讀), suggesting a phenomenological awareness of the difference between
intellectual understanding and embodied mastery.
3.3 The Chinese Brush and the Egyptian Hieratic: Cross-Cultural Body
Techniques
One of the most striking
episodes in the diary's account of embodied knowledge acquisition occurs not at
Maiden Castle but in Alan Gardiner's Egyptology seminar at UCL. The diary
records that Xia Nai experimented with writing Egyptian hieratic script using a
Chinese writing brush (毛筆) rather than the conventional reed pen, and that
Gardiner expressed admiration for the results — noting that certain stroke
characteristics of the hieratic were more naturally produced with the Chinese
brush than with Western instruments.
This episode rewards
analysis from the perspective of Marcel Mauss's concept of 'techniques of the
body' — the culturally specific ways in which bodies are trained to perform
skilled actions. Xia Nai's Chinese calligraphic training had habituated his hand
and forearm to a particular set of movements: controlled pressure variation,
sustained fine-motor contact with a flexible-tipped instrument, sensitivity to
ink viscosity and surface texture. These bodily dispositions, acquired through
years of practice in one script tradition, proved transferable — with selective
modification — to the demands of an entirely different ancient writing system.
The episode also illuminates
a dimension of knowledge transfer that conventional histories of archaeology,
focused on methods and theories, consistently overlook: the role of the body as
a resource that the travelling scholar brings from one tradition and deploys,
sometimes unexpectedly, in another. Xia Nai did not travel to London as an
empty vessel to be filled with British archaeological technique; he arrived
with a trained body whose competencies created new possibilities that his
British teachers had not anticipated.
IV. Feeling Like an Archaeologist: The Emotional History of Scholarly
Formation
4.1 'Self-Shame and Self-Hatred': The Affective Politics of Wartime
Scholarship
The history of emotions, as
developed by scholars including Barbara Rosenwein, Rob Boddice, and Jan
Plamper, has established that emotions are not simply private interior states
but historically and culturally structured phenomena that must be read in relation
to the 'emotional communities' — Rosenwein's term — within which individuals
are embedded. Xia Nai's diary is rich in emotion, but the emotional vocabulary
it deploys is rarely simply personal: it is consistently mediated by the
collective norms and expectations of the Republican-era Chinese intellectual
community.
The phrase '自慚自恨' (zì
cán zì hèn — self-shame, self-hatred) appears in the diary repeatedly after the
Marco Polo Bridge Incident of 7 July 1937. The emotion it registers is complex:
shame at being far from China while his country is at war; self-hatred at the
inadequacy of scholarship as a response to military crisis; and an implicit
demand for a form of 'useful knowledge' that the diary itself both enacts and
questions. This emotional structure is not unique to Xia Nai but is
recognisable across the diaries and correspondence of his Chinese intellectual
contemporaries — it is, in Rosenwein's terms, an emotion characterising a
specific emotional community defined by its simultaneous commitment to
internationalist scholarly standards and nationalist political loyalty.
4.2 The 'Imaginary Will': Illness, Mortality, and Scholarly Commitment
In May 1937, Xia Nai was
hospitalised in London for gastric surgery. During his recovery, he wrote what
he called a 'fictitious will' (假遺囑) in his diary — a document that, while
framed ironically, distributes his possessions, academic notes, and unfinished
manuscripts among friends and family. The entry is one of the most remarkable
in the entire diary, combining black humour with genuine mortality awareness
and an implicit statement about the relative value of different forms of
intellectual capital.
The 'will' distributes his
library to specific colleagues based on their research interests, designates
his unfinished thesis notes to be entrusted to Glanville with the hope that
'someone might one day complete it', and expresses, through the conventional
form of testamentary disposition, a profound anxiety about the relationship
between individual scholarly life and the continuation of knowledge projects
beyond that life. Read through the lens of emotional history, the document is
simultaneously a coping mechanism (humour as a response to surgical fear), a
form of social bonding (imagining the distribution of possessions as an act of
relationship), and an implicit statement about scholarly legacy.
4.3 Moonlight, Mahjong, and the Texture of Intellectual Joy
The emotional history of
scholarship has tended to focus on its negative affective dimensions — anxiety,
isolation, frustration, failure. The Xia Nai diary offers equally rich material
for the history of intellectual pleasure, and this pleasure deserves equal
analytical attention. The mid-autumn moonlight that immediately followed the
completion of his thesis on 14 September 1943 is not incidental atmospheric
detail: in the Chinese poetic tradition, the mid-autumn moon (中秋月) is a figure
saturated with associations of completion, reunion, and the satisfaction of
things properly accomplished. The diary's juxtaposition of thesis completion
and moonlit stroll is not accidental — it is a culturally informed aesthetic
choice that locates intellectual achievement within a framework of meaning
drawn from Chinese literary tradition rather than from the academic conventions
of the UCL thesis committee.
This points to a broader
phenomenon: the ways in which Xia Nai's intellectual formation involved the
continuous, often implicit negotiation between multiple cultural frameworks for
assigning meaning to scholarly work. The British academic tradition, with its
apparatus of supervision, examination, and institutional validation; the
Chinese literati tradition, with its emphasis on self-cultivation, moral
integrity, and the relationship between individual learning and social
responsibility; and the empiricist tradition of Petrie's Egyptology, with its
valorisation of patient, systematic accumulation — all three provided competing
and sometimes complementary emotional grammars for the work of archaeology.
V. The Thesis as Biographical Event: Completion, Transmission, and the
Politics of Non-Publication
5.1 Writing in Wartime China: The Material Conditions of Completion
The completion of Xia Nai's
Egyptian bead thesis in 1943 occurred under conditions that deserve careful
description, since they illuminate with particular clarity the contingency of
scholarly achievement. Between his return to China in January 1941 and the
thesis completion in September 1943, Xia Nai was simultaneously: conducting
Chinese archaeological fieldwork (the Hàn cliff tombs at Pénshān in 1941);
teaching and lecturing at the Academia Sinica's wartime compound at Lǐzhuāng;
managing correspondence with UCL under conditions of severe wartime postal
disruption; participating in the institutional politics of the Institute of
History and Philology; and completing, chapter by chapter, an English-language
doctoral thesis on ancient Egyptian bead typology — a topic for which he had no
institutional library support, no access to the specimens themselves, and
severely limited communication with his supervisor.
The diary records the
chapter-by-chapter progress of this work with the same meticulous regularity
that it had recorded the card-making in London and Cairo. Entries from 1942 and
1943 track the completion of successive chapters — Predynastic Beads, Protodynastic
Beads, Early Dynastic Beads, Old Kingdom Beads, through to the Graeco-Roman
chapter that was finished on 12 September, two days before the entry recording
the whole thesis complete. The regularity of this record — its resistance to
dramatisation, its embedding of major intellectual milestones in the ordinary
texture of daily life — is itself a form of evidence about the emotional
economy of wartime scholarship: the way in which disciplined routine functioned
as a psychological anchor amid the chaos of displacement, illness, and military
crisis.
5.2 The Absent Viva and the Special Permission: Institutional Flexibility
in Extremis
In July 1946, UCL awarded
Xia Nai the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Egyptian Archaeology, without
requiring him to defend his thesis in person. This administrative decision
— taken after the university's wartime closure ended — reflects what might be
called the 'institutional elasticity' of the British university system under
exceptional circumstances. The degree was awarded on the basis of the submitted
thesis alone, the examination committee apparently satisfied that the scholarly
standard was beyond question. The diary does not record Xia Nai's emotional
response to this news, but the structural parallel with his wartime letter to
Glanville — in which he described the thesis as '現下似無希望' (currently
seeming without hope) — makes the eventual award all the more striking as a
biographical reversal.
5.3 Seventy-One Years in the Library: The Politics of Non-Publication
The thesis's non-publication
between 1943 and 2014 is not a minor bibliographical curiosity but a
substantive historiographical problem. UCL's Stephen Quirke, in his preface to
the 2014 Springer edition, offered one explanation: the thesis was 'so successful'
that it deterred others from attempting the same work. A complementary
explanation lies in the structural conditions of Xia Nai's post-1949 career: as
Director of the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences, he worked within a political and institutional framework that offered
no encouragement, and significant discouragement, for sustained engagement with
Egyptological research.
The result is that a thesis,
written by a Chinese scholar in wartime Sichuan about ancient Egyptian material
culture held in a London museum, sat unpublished in the UCL library for over
seven decades while the field it addressed developed around it — incorporating
Xia Nai's findings when scholars happened to consult the manuscript, but unable
to cite a published source. The 2014 Springer publication, jointly produced by
the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a German academic press, corrected
this anomaly. The episode raises important questions about the geopolitics of
academic publishing — questions that connect the history of Egyptology to the
broader history of how non-Western contributions to globally-circulated
disciplines have been structurally delayed, overlooked, or marginalised.
VI. Conclusion: Diary as Method
This article has argued that
Xia Nai's diary offers three forms of evidence that formal publications
systematically withhold: evidence of the material infrastructure of knowledge
production (the index card as cognitive technology); evidence of embodied knowledge
transmission (the bodily competencies acquired and transferred at Maiden Castle
and in Gardiner's seminar room); and evidence of the emotional registers
through which scholarly formation occurs (the 'self-shame and self-hatred' of
the wartime intellectual, the black humour of the surgical 'will', the moonlit
satisfaction of thesis completion).
The broader methodological
implication is that the history of archaeology — like the history of science
more generally — needs to take seriously the non-published record as a primary
rather than supplementary source. The diary, the field notebook, the index
card, the letter: these are not minor supplements to the published record but
often its most important complement, preserving precisely the dimensions of
knowledge-making that the conventions of scholarly publication have
historically suppressed.
In Xia Nai's case, the
diary's value is further enhanced by its function as a record of translation —
not merely the linguistic translation between Chinese and English, or between
the traditions of Chinese philology and British Egyptology, but the translation
between different cultural frameworks for assigning meaning to scholarly work.
The mid-autumn moon that ended the day of his thesis completion was not merely
pleasant weather: it was a hermeneutic resource, drawn from a literary
tradition that has been thinking about completion and achievement for two
millennia, that allowed Xia Nai to locate his English-language doctoral thesis
about Egyptian beads within a framework of significance that UCL's examination
system could not provide.
To take seriously this
translational dimension of scholarly formation is to begin to write a genuinely
global history of the human sciences — one that attends not only to the
circulation of methods and theories across national and disciplinary boundaries,
but to the multiple, sometimes incommensurable, frameworks of meaning within
which the work of understanding the human past has been conducted.
References
Primary Sources
Xia Nai 夏鼐. Diary (日記), 1935–1943. Cited
from: 《夏鼐日記》全十卷, ed. 廈門大學歷史系. Shanghai: East China Normal University Press,
2011.
Xia Nai [Shiah, Nai]. 'A Chinese Parallel to
an Egyptian Idiom.' Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 24.1 (1938): 127–128.
Xia Nai [Shiah, Nai]. 'Some Remarks on the
Bekhen-Stone.' Annales du Service des Antiquités de l'Égypte 41 (1942):
189–205.
Xia Nai. Ancient Egyptian Beads. Berlin and
Heidelberg: Springer; Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2014 [PhD thesis
submitted 1943; degree awarded UCL 1946].
中文期刊論文（均可於中國知網 CNKI 下載）
[1]
夏鼐：《五四運動和中國近代考古學的興起》，《考古》1979年第3期，第193頁。（CNKI可下載）[Xia Nai, The May Fourth
Movement and the Rise of Modern Chinese Archaeology, Kaogu, 1979(3), p. 193.]
[2]
夏鼐：《關於考古學上文化的定名問題》，《考古》1959年第4期，第170頁。（CNKI可下載）[Xia Nai, On the Problem of
Naming Archaeological Cultures, Kaogu, 1959(4), p. 170.]
[3]
夏鼐：《碳-14測定年代和中國史前考古學》，《考古》1977年第4期，第217頁。（CNKI可下載）[Xia Nai, Radiocarbon Dating
and Chinese Prehistoric Archaeology, Kaogu, 1977(4), p. 217.]
[4]
王仲殊：《夏鼐先生簡介》，《考古》1985年第8期，第677頁。（CNKI可下載）[Wang Zhongshu, A Brief Account of Mr
Xia Nai, Kaogu, 1985(8), p. 677.]
[5]
王世民：《夏鼐與新中國考古學——紀念夏鼐先生誕辰110周年》，《考古學報》2020年第3期，第1頁。（CNKI可下載）[Wang Shimin, Xia
Nai and Archaeology of New China: Commemorating the 110th Anniversary of Xia
Nai-s Birth, Acta Archaeologica Sinica, 2020(3), p. 1.]
[6]
王世民、王仲殊：《夏鼐先生的治學之路》，《考古》2010年第2期。（CNKI可下載）[Wang Shimin and Wang Zhongshu, Mr
Xia Nai-s Path of Scholarly Formation, Kaogu, 2010(2).]
[7]
湯惠生：《夏鼐、蘇秉琦兩個考古學不同取向辨析》，《南方文物》2020年第6期，第1—4頁。（CNKI可下載）[Tang Huisheng, An
Analysis of the Divergent Scholarly Orientations of Xia Nai and Su Bingqi,
Nanfang Wenwu, 2020(6), pp. 1-4.]
[8]
王興：《夏鼐與中國馬克思主義史學的古史建構》，《歷史研究》2023年第5期。（CNKI可下載）[Wang Xing, Xia Nai and the
Construction of Ancient History in Chinese Marxist Historiography, Lishi
Yanjiu, 2023(5).]
[9]
陳星燦：《中國考古學史上的外國人》，《考古》1997年第7期，第16頁。（CNKI可下載）[Chen Xingcan, Foreigners in the
History of Chinese Archaeology, Kaogu, 1997(7), p. 16.]
[10]
王世民：《夏鼐先生對考古所工作基本建設的貢獻》，《考古》2000年第2期，第15頁。（CNKI可下載）[Wang Shimin, Xia Nai-s
Contributions to the Basic Infrastructure of the Institute of Archaeology,
Kaogu, 2000(2), p. 15.]
[11]
陳星燦：《中國考古學的歷史與現狀》，《世界歷史》2002年第2期。（CNKI可下載）[Chen Xingcan, History and Current
State of Chinese Archaeology, Shijie Lishi, 2002(2).]
[12]
夏鼐、王世民（整理）：《關於考古研究中的幾個問題》，《考古》1984年第10期，第923頁。（CNKI可下載）[Xia Nai (ed. Wang
Shimin), On Several Problems in Archaeological Research, Kaogu, 1984(10), p.
923.]
[13]
朱乃誠：《中國文明起源研究的歷史與現狀》，《中國史研究動態》2003年第2期。（CNKI可下載）[Zhu Naicheng, History and
Current State of Research on the Origins of Chinese Civilization, Zhongguo Shi
Yanjiu Dongtai, 2003(2).]
Secondary Sources — Western-language Works
Blair, Ann. Too Much to Know: Managing
Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. New Haven: Yale University Press,
2010.
Boddice, Rob. The History of Emotions.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018.
Chang, K. C. 'Xia Nai (1910–1985).' American
Anthropologist 88.2 (1986): 442–444.
Collins, Harry. Tacit and Explicit Knowledge.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Daston, Lorraine, ed. Things That Talk:
Object Lessons from Art and Science. New York: Zone Books, 2004.
Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison.
Objectivity. New York: Zone Books, 2007.
Doyon, Wendy. 'Xia Nai's Egypt in the
Archaeology of China: Field Workers and Field Methods in Xia Nai's Diary at
Armant, Egypt, 1938.' In Addressing Diversity: Inclusive Histories of
Egyptology, ed. H. Navratilova et al. Munster: Zaphon, 2023, 509–534.
Field, E., and T. Wang. 'Xia Nai: The London
Connection.' Orientations (June 1997): 38–41.
Mauss, Marcel. 'Techniques of the Body.'
Economy and Society 2.1 (1973 [1934]): 70–88.
Polanyi, Michael. The Tacit Dimension.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966.
Quirke, Stephen. 'Preface: On Receiving Xia
Nai's Ancient Egyptian Beads in the Twenty-First Century.' In Xia Nai, Ancient
Egyptian Beads. Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer, 2014, vii–x.
Rosenwein, Barbara H. Emotional Communities
in the Early Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.
Stevenson, Alice. 'The Largest and the Only
Fully Dated Collection: Xia Nai and Egyptian Beads.' In The Petrie Museum of
Egyptian Archaeology: Characters and Collections, ed. Alice Stevenson. London:
UCL Press, 2015, 106–108.
te Heesen, Anke. The World in a Box: The
Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2002.
Beyond the Centre-Periphery:
Archaeological Knowledge,
Non-Western Agency, and the New Imperial
History of Archaeology
Xia Nai, H. D. Sankalia, Zeng Zhaoyu,
and the Remaking
of British Field Methods in China and
India, 1935–1950
[Author name redacted for blind review]
[Institutional affiliation redacted for blind review]
Submitted to: Past
& Present / Journal of World History / Comparative Studies in Society and
History
This article uses the
New Imperial History framework — with its emphasis on multi-directional
knowledge flows, non-Western agency, and the internal heterogeneity of imperial
knowledge systems — to analyse the comparative trajectories of three
non-Western archaeologists who trained in Britain in the mid-1930s and
subsequently introduced, adapted, or contested British field methods in their
home countries: the Chinese archaeologist Xia Nai (夏鼐, 1910–1985), the Indian
archaeologist Hasmukhlal Dhirajlal Sankalia (1908–1989), and the Chinese
archaeologist and museologist Zeng Zhaoyu (曾昭燏, 1909–1964). Against the
backdrop of Mortimer Wheeler's simultaneous role as trainer of non-Western
scholars at Maiden Castle and as Director-General of the Archaeological Survey
of India (1944–1948), the article argues that the comparison of these three
cases reveals: (1) the constitutive role of political context (semi-colonial
China vs. British India) in shaping the posture of knowledge reception; (2) the
internal diversity of 'British archaeology' as a knowledge system, which gave
non-Western scholars significant room for selective appropriation; and (3) the
reversibility and multi-directionality of knowledge flows, as illustrated by
Xia Nai's corrections of Gardiner's Chinese linguistics, his contributions to
Lucas's reference work on Egyptian materials, and Sankalia's subsequent
challenge to Wheeler's Aryan invasion thesis.
Keywords:
New Imperial History;
archaeology; knowledge transfer; Xia Nai; H. D. Sankalia; Zeng Zhaoyu; Mortimer
Wheeler; China; India; colonial knowledge; postcolonial archaeology; global
history of science
I. Introduction: The Limits of Diffusionism
In August 1936, two young
archaeologists worked simultaneously in the excavation trenches of Maiden
Castle, the Iron Age hillfort in Dorset being excavated by Mortimer Wheeler.
One was a Chinese scholar, Xia Nai (夏鼐), trained initially in Chinese art history
at UCL's Courtauld Institute, now retraining himself in Egyptian archaeology
under Stephen Glanville. The other was an Indian scholar, H. D. Sankalia, whose
PhD on the archaeology of Gujarat was nearing completion, and who had been
invited by Wheeler to participate in the excavation as part of his practical
field training. Both men were there to learn what Wheeler was teaching:
stratigraphic excavation, section drawing, systematic find recording, the
scientific discipline of archaeological fieldwork as Wheeler understood and
embodied it.
A conventional history of
the diffusion of archaeological knowledge might treat this scene as an
illustration of the global reach of British expertise: the centre of world
archaeology training the periphery. This article argues, on the contrary, that
such a framing misrepresents almost everything significant about what was
happening. Xia Nai and Sankalia were not blank slates being inscribed with
British method. They were active, critical, selective learners who brought to
Maiden Castle intellectual resources — linguistic, cultural, institutional,
political — that Wheeler's pedagogy had not anticipated and could not
accommodate. What they took from Maiden Castle, and what they did with it, was
shaped not by the content of Wheeler's teaching but by the complex intersection
of their own scholarly agendas, their institutional positions in their home
countries, and the political contexts within which they would eventually deploy
what they had learned.
This article deploys the
analytical framework of New Imperial History — with its commitments to
recovering non-Western agency, tracing multi-directional knowledge flows, and
attending to the internal heterogeneity of imperial knowledge systems — to
analyse the comparative trajectories of Xia Nai, Sankalia, and a third figure,
the Chinese archaeologist and museologist Zeng Zhaoyu (曾昭燏, 1909–1964), who
also studied in Britain in the mid-1930s. The comparison is structured around
four questions: What did each scholar actually learn in Britain, and from whom?
How did political context shape the posture of knowledge reception? How did
each scholar adapt, modify, or contest what they had learned when they returned
home? And what do these three trajectories, taken together, tell us about the
nature of colonial and semi-colonial knowledge transfer in the human sciences?
II. Theoretical Framework: New Imperial History and the Archaeology of
Knowledge
2.1 The Limits of Epistemic Imperialism
The concept of 'epistemic
imperialism' — the idea that colonial power operated through the imposition of
European knowledge frameworks on non-European peoples, histories, and
environments — has been one of the most productive analytical tools in postcolonial
studies since its development by scholars including Martin Carnoy, Walter
Mignolo, and Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Applied to archaeology specifically,
the concept has generated important critiques of the ways in which European
field methods, periodisation schemes, and interpretive frameworks have been
used to control the meaning of non-European pasts. Bruce Trigger's foundational
typology of nationalist, colonialist, and imperialist archaeologies,
subsequently elaborated by scholars including Margarita Diaz-Andieu, Nick
Shepherd, and Yannis Hamilakis, has provided a framework for understanding how
archaeology has served the political interests of colonial states.
Yet the epistemic
imperialism framework has significant limitations when applied to the specific
cases examined here. It tends to model knowledge transfer as a one-way process
— from European centre to non-European periphery — and to model the non-European
recipient as structurally passive, even when individual agency is acknowledged
at the level of rhetoric. It struggles to account for cases where non-Western
scholars actively sought out European methods, found them genuinely useful for
their own scholarly agendas, and made substantive contributions to the European
disciplines from which they were supposedly learning. And it cannot adequately
theorise the significance of internal diversity within 'British archaeology' as
a knowledge system: the fact that Wheeler's stratigraphic method, Petrie's
typological method, Glanville's Egyptological philology, and Yetts's Chinese
art-historical method represented not a single 'British archaeology' but
several competing traditions with different epistemological commitments.
2.2 New Imperial History: Multi-Directionality and Non-Western Agency
The New Imperial History, as
developed by scholars including Antoinette Burton, Alan Lester, Tony
Ballantyne, and Adele Perry, offers a more adequate framework. Its key
contributions relevant to the present analysis are: (1) the insistence on
multi-directional knowledge flows, including the ways in which 'peripheral'
knowledge modified and enriched 'metropolitan' disciplines; (2) the recovery of
non-Western subjects as active agents in the production and transmission of
knowledge, rather than as passive recipients of European enlightenment; (3)
attention to the role of gender, class, and institutional position in shaping
the possibilities available to non-Western scholars within imperial knowledge
networks; and (4) a willingness to hold together, without resolving
prematurely, the genuine contributions of colonial-era scholarship and the
structural asymmetries of power within which that scholarship was conducted.
Applied to archaeology
specifically, this framework has been developed by Kristian Kristiansen, who
has traced the multiple centres and peripheries of European prehistoric
archaeology, by Matthew Spriggs and others on Pacific archaeology, and by a
growing literature on South Asian and East Asian archaeology. The present
article extends this framework by providing a systematic three-way comparison
that foregrounds both the similarities and differences among non-Western
scholars operating within overlapping but distinct imperial and semi-colonial
contexts.
2.3 The Semi-Colonial Case: China's Distinctive Position
A theoretical complication
specific to two of the three cases examined here is that China in the 1930s was
not a British colony but what scholars have described as a 'semi-colonial' or
'quasi-colonial' society: formally sovereign, but subject to extensive foreign
concessions, unequal treaties, and the economic and cultural penetration of
multiple imperial powers simultaneously. This status gave Chinese scholars a
distinctive position within imperial knowledge networks: they were not subject
to the institutional apparatus of colonial archaeology (no Archaeological
Survey of China existed on the model of the ASI), but they operated within a
cultural and political environment in which both 'Western learning' and
'Chinese essence' carried heavy ideological freight.
For Xia Nai and Zeng Zhaoyu,
the decision to seek training in Britain was not mandated by a colonial
administration but was an active choice made within a specific intellectual and
political context: the conviction, shared by the founding generation of Chinese
archaeology around Li Ji and Fu Sinian, that the nascent Chinese discipline
needed to engage seriously with the methodological standards being developed in
European and American archaeology, not in order to reproduce those standards
wholesale, but in order to participate in the international scholarly
conversation on equal terms.
III. Three Cases: Reception, Adaptation, and Contestation
3.1 Xia Nai: Selective Appropriation and the 'Parallel Processing' of
Traditions
3.1.1 Two Training Traditions, One Scholar
Xia Nai's British training
was bifurcated in a way that is unusual in the history of archaeology: he
received systematic instruction in two distinct methodological traditions —
Chinese art history and Egyptological typology — before arriving, via the volunteer
excavation at Maiden Castle, at the stratigraphic field methods that would
prove most directly applicable to his subsequent Chinese work. This bifurcation
was not accidental but was the product of a deliberate dissatisfaction with his
initial training.
The diary records his
growing frustration with Yetts's Chinese art-historical approach as early as
March 1936: '我真想離開這兒，改學埃及學或史前考古學' (I really want to leave here and study
Egyptology or prehistoric archaeology instead). The frustration is not merely
personal but methodological: Yetts's 'eye-learning' (眼學) — the connoisseurial
tradition of stylistic attribution based on visual intuition — lacked the
systematic, quantifiable, and reproducible characteristics that Xia Nai
associated with scientific archaeology. His move to Glanville's Egyptology was
a move toward a tradition that shared his preference for systematic
classification, statistical analysis, and the integration of material evidence
with documentary record.
3.1.2 The Maiden Castle Training: Non-Formal Appropriation
Xia Nai's relationship to
Wheeler at Maiden Castle was fundamentally different from Sankalia's. He was
not Wheeler's student but a self-directed volunteer who used the excavation as
a learning environment without formal pedagogical obligation. The diary records
his active pursuit of different trench assignments precisely to maximise his
exposure to varied stratigraphic conditions. This 'non-formal appropriation' of
Wheeler's method gave Xia Nai a distinctive freedom: he could take what he
found useful and leave what he did not, without the institutional constraints
that shaped a formal student's relationship to a supervisor.
What Xia Nai took from
Maiden Castle was not Wheeler's entire methodological package but a specific
set of precision instruments: the clinometer for section drawing, the
systematic levelling protocol for establishing height relationships, the
principle of recording all finds by stratigraphic layer rather than by depth
from surface. These instruments were transferable to Chinese field conditions;
Wheeler's specific institutional apparatus — the grid system designed for sites
with deep stratification and complex defensive features — was less directly
applicable to the cliff-tomb archaeology of Sichuan or the loess-plateau
conditions of northern China.
3.1.3 Reverse Flows: Xia Nai's Contributions to British Scholarship
The epistemic imperialism
framework, with its emphasis on one-way flows from centre to periphery, cannot
accommodate a striking feature of Xia Nai's London period: the multiple ways in
which his presence enriched and corrected the scholarship of his British
colleagues. The diary records at least three instances of what might be called
'reverse knowledge flow'.
First, in November 1937, Xia
Nai corrected Gardiner's use of a Chinese linguistic parallel in a seminar on
Egyptian grammar. Gardiner subsequently invited him to publish a brief note in
the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology — which appeared in 1938 as 'A
Chinese Parallel to an Egyptian Idiom' — making Xia Nai, at twenty-seven, a
published contributor to British Egyptological scholarship.
Second, his bead corpus
research produced results that Alfred Lucas incorporated into revisions of his
standard reference work Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries. Lucas's
acknowledgement of Xia Nai's corrections — which identified misidentified materials
and misdated assemblages in the existing literature — represents a clear
instance of non-Western scholarship modifying and improving a core text of the
British Egyptological tradition.
Third, Xia Nai's 1942 paper
'Some Remarks on the Bekhen-Stone,' published in the Annales du Service des
Antiquités de l'Égypte, contributed to the identification of a specific
Egyptian stone type. Both papers were published while Xia Nai was physically in
China, separated from the European scholarly community by two war theatres — a
logistical achievement that itself constitutes evidence of his active
participation in, rather than peripheral reception of, the disciplinary
conversation.
3.2 H. D. Sankalia: The Colonial Institutional Frame and Post-Independence
Critique
3.2.1 A Different Reception Environment
Sankalia's training at the
University of London (1934–1936) and at Maiden Castle (where he worked for
approximately one month under Wheeler's supervision) occurred within a
fundamentally different institutional environment from Xia Nai's. While Xia Nai
returned to a China in which the academic infrastructure was being built
largely from scratch, Sankalia returned to British India, where the
Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) — founded in 1861, the institutional
expression of colonial archaeological administration — was the dominant
framework within which any Indian archaeologist had to operate.
The ASI's rejection of
Sankalia's application for employment after his return from Britain in 1937 —
one of the more remarkable miscalculations in the institutional history of
South Asian archaeology — forced him to work outside the colonial apparatus entirely,
joining Deccan College in Pune. This institutional marginalisation, paradoxical
from the perspective of the colonial knowledge hierarchy, actually gave
Sankalia greater freedom to develop an independent research agenda: his
systematic surveys of megalithic sites in Maharashtra, his excavations at
Langhnaj that disproved the assumed hiatus between Lower Palaeolithic and
Neolithic in Gujarat, and his later foundational work at Maheshwar-Navdatoli
were all conducted outside the formal ASI framework.
3.2.2 Wheeler in India: The Limits of Direct Imperial Transfer
The contrast between
Sankalia's 'non-formal appropriation' model and Wheeler's 'direct colonial
transfer' model — the latter enacted when Wheeler served as ASI
Director-General from 1944 to 1948 — is analytically instructive. Wheeler's
direct appointment to lead the ASI represented the paradigm of imperial
knowledge imposition: a British archaeologist, using the apparatus of colonial
administration, reforming the methodological practices of Indian archaeology
according to his own standards.
Wheeler's technical
contributions during this period were genuine: he introduced stratigraphic
excavation as standard practice, established training programmes for Indian
archaeologists, and conducted major excavations at Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, and
Arikamedu. But his interpretive contributions were significantly more
problematic. His thesis that the decline of the Indus Valley Civilisation was
caused by the invasion of Aryan peoples from Central Asia — encapsulated in the
famous formulation 'on circumstantial evidence, Indra stands accused' — imposed
a European migration narrative on South Asian prehistory that subsequent Indian
and Pakistani archaeologists spent decades dismantling.
Sankalia's response to
Wheeler's Aryan invasion thesis illustrates the complexity of the relationship
between trained student and imperial instructor. He did not mount a frontal
challenge to Wheeler's authority during the latter's ASI tenure — the institutional
power asymmetry made this difficult — but his subsequent archaeological work
systematically undermined the evidential foundations of the thesis,
demonstrating the indigenous continuity of Indian cultural development in the
regions and periods Wheeler had attributed to external invasion. This is a
pattern of 'deferred critique' — accepting the technical training while
contesting the interpretive framework — that represents a specific form of
non-Western agency within colonial knowledge relationships.
3.3 Zeng Zhaoyu: Gender, Institutional Trajectory, and the Munich
Supplement
3.3.1 A Third Training Path
Zeng Zhaoyu's British
training (University of London, 1935–1937, studying archaeology at her own
expense) followed a different trajectory from either Xia Nai or Sankalia, both
in its institutional character and in its subsequent supplementation. After her
London period, Zeng undertook an internship at the German National Museum —
exposing her to the German art-historical and museum studies tradition as well
as to the British field methods that Xia Nai and Sankalia had prioritised. This
dual exposure gave her training a distinctive character: she was simultaneously
engaged with the British empiricist tradition and with the German idealist
tradition of Kulturgeschichte, which approached archaeological assemblages as
expressions of cultural wholes rather than as collections of individually
classifiable types.
The gender dimension of Zeng
Zhaoyu's trajectory deserves explicit attention. As a woman working in a
male-dominated field in both China and Britain in the 1930s, she navigated
institutional constraints that Xia Nai and Sankalia did not face. The diary of
Xia Nai records their interactions at Lǐzhuāng with collegial warmth — they are
fellow members of the Academia Sinica's wartime scholarly community — but does
not register the structural difference in their positions. When Zeng became the
first female president of the Nanjing Museum in 1955, she did so within a
Chinese institutional framework that was, in some respects, more open to female
scholarly leadership than the contemporary British or Indian frameworks; when
she was politically persecuted in the 1960s and died in December 1964, her
trajectory illuminated the specific vulnerabilities of the Chinese female
intellectual within the Maoist political system.
3.3.2 Museological vs. Field-Archaeological Knowledge Transfer
The most significant
difference between Zeng Zhaoyu's British training and that of Xia Nai and
Sankalia was its disciplinary focus: while they prioritised field methodology,
she prioritised museology — the organisation, preservation, documentation, and
display of archaeological collections. This different emphasis reflected a
genuine difference in intellectual priorities, shaped in part by gender (female
scholars in 1930s Chinese archaeology were more likely to be channelled toward
museum work than field excavation) and in part by personal scholarly interest.
The result is that the
knowledge Zeng brought back from Britain was not primarily methodological in
the field sense but institutional in the museum sense: standards for collection
documentation, principles of artifact conservation, models for public display
of archaeological material. Her co-authored volume on museum studies with Li Ji
became a foundational text for Chinese museology, establishing professional
standards for the field in a period when the Chinese museum system was itself
being constructed.
IV. Comparative Analysis: Structures, Patterns, and Theoretical
Implications
4.1 Comparative Overview
The following table summarises the key
dimensions of comparison across the three cases:
|
Dimension
|
Xia Nai
(China)
|
H. D.
Sankalia (India)
|
Zeng Zhaoyu
(China)
|
|
Period in
Britain
|
1935–1939
(UCL)
|
1934–1936
(Univ. of London)
|
1935–1937
(Univ. of London)
|
|
Primary
supervisor
|
S. Glanville
(Egyptology); W. P. Yetts (Chinese art)
|
K. de B.
Codrington; R. E. M. Wheeler (field)
|
Various; then
German National Museum internship
|
|
Maiden Castle
training
|
6 weeks (Aug.
1936), volunteer excavator
|
c. 1 month (c.
1935–36), training period
|
No record of
participation
|
|
Thesis topic
|
Ancient
Egyptian beads; typology, chronology
|
Archaeology of
Gujarat: inscriptions, monuments
|
Chinese
bronzes / museology (degree at Univ. of London)
|
|
Degree awarded
|
PhD Egyptian
Archaeology, UCL, 1946 (thesis 1943)
|
PhD 1936
|
Diploma /
postgraduate study; internship Germany
|
|
Political
context
|
Semi-colonial
China; wartime displacement
|
British India;
post-1947 independence
|
Semi-colonial
China; civil war; PRC 1949
|
|
Reception
institution
|
Academia
Sinica (Institute of History & Philology)
|
Deccan
College, Pune (rejected by ASI)
|
Central Museum
→ Nanjing Museum
|
|
Knowledge
transfer mode
|
Selective
self-directed adoption; wartime bricolage
|
Wheeler method
+ indigenous survey traditions
|
Museological +
art-historical synthesis; German influence
|
|
Post-return
fate
|
Director,
Inst. of Archaeology, CASS (1962–1982)
|
Chair, Dept.
of Archaeology, Deccan College (1939–1973)
|
President,
Nanjing Museum (1955–1964); political victim
|
4.2 Political Context and the Posture of Knowledge Reception
The comparison reveals a
clear relationship between political context and the posture of knowledge
reception. Xia Nai and Zeng Zhaoyu, operating from a semi-colonial Chinese
context, were able to adopt a posture of selective, self-directed
appropriation: there was no colonial institutional apparatus mandating specific
forms of knowledge transfer, and the Chinese academic community's own leaders
(Li Ji, Fu Sinian) had articulated a framework — 'observe Chinese ancient
culture from the perspective of all humanity' — that was simultaneously
internationalist in method and nationalist in ultimate purpose. This
combination gave Chinese scholars significant freedom to choose what to take
from British archaeology and how to use it.
Sankalia, operating from
within the colonial framework of British India, faced a more constrained
situation: the ASI represented an institutionalised form of colonial
archaeological practice that both drew on and departed from the British
metropolitan tradition that Wheeler embodied. His freedom of appropriation was
real — as his independent work at Deccan College demonstrated — but it operated
in the shadow of, and partly in reaction to, an entrenched colonial
archaeological establishment that had no Chinese equivalent.
4.3 The Internal Heterogeneity of 'British Archaeology'
A second finding of the
comparison is the importance of attending to the internal diversity of 'British
archaeology' as a knowledge system. All three scholars encountered not a single
tradition but multiple competing traditions: Yetts's Chinese art history;
Wheeler's stratigraphic field method; Petrie's typological and statistical
approach; Glanville's Egyptological philology; the German-influenced
art-historical museology that Zeng encountered both in London and subsequently
in Munich. The different choices made by the three scholars — Xia Nai
ultimately choosing Glanville plus Wheeler; Sankalia choosing Wheeler plus the
Indian inscriptional tradition; Zeng choosing museology plus German
Kulturgeschichte — reflect not simply personal preferences but strategic
assessments of which tools would be most useful for their respective scholarly
agendas.
This diversity within
'British archaeology' meant that the knowledge system these scholars
encountered was not a monolith but a contested terrain, within which they could
find resources that supported their own critical perspectives as well as ones
they rejected. Xia Nai's rejection of Yetts's connoisseurialism, like
Sankalia's subsequent critique of Wheeler's Aryan invasion narrative, was made
possible by the existence within British archaeology of alternative traditions
— more empiricist, more quantitative, more attentive to stratigraphic context —
that the critical scholar could invoke against the dominant one.
4.4 Multi-Directionality and the Myth of the Passive Recipient
The third major finding
concerns the multi-directionality of knowledge flows. In all three cases, the
scholars in question were not passive recipients of British knowledge but
active contributors to the British disciplines from which they were learning. Xia
Nai's corrections to Gardiner and Lucas, his publications in British and French
Egyptological journals, and his 1,760-card bead index that was incorporated
into UCL's research infrastructure represent the most documented instance, but
Sankalia's extensive correspondence with British archaeologists and his
subsequent invitation of F. E. Zeuner (at Wheeler's own recommendation) to
interpret the palaeoclimate of Gujarat suggest similar dynamics.
The asymmetry of
acknowledgement is striking. Xia Nai's contributions to British Egyptology were
so significant that they 'deterred' a generation of British scholars from
undertaking comparable work — yet his name was virtually unknown in the field
until the 2014 publication of his thesis. Sankalia's fundamental challenge to
Wheeler's Aryan invasion thesis is routinely described in the secondary
literature as part of the 'scholarly consensus that emerged to reject Wheeler's
theory' — without adequate attribution of the role that Indian scholars,
trained by Wheeler himself, played in dismantling his interpretive framework.
The non-publication and non-attribution of non-Western scholarly contributions
is itself a dimension of the structural asymmetry of imperial knowledge
networks that the New Imperial History framework helps to identify and
critique.
V. Wheeler as Pivot: Direct Colonial Transfer and Its Contradictions
Mortimer Wheeler's
simultaneous role as trainer of non-Western scholars at Maiden Castle and as
Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India from 1944 to 1948 makes
him a uniquely instructive figure for the analysis of imperial knowledge transfer.
His career encapsulates, in a single biography, both the 'indirect' model of
knowledge transfer (training non-Western scholars who return home to develop
their own traditions) and the 'direct' model (physically transplanting himself,
with his methods and his institutional authority, into a colonial
archaeological establishment).
The comparison of these two
modes — the Maiden Castle volunteer programme and the ASI directorship —
reveals their strikingly different outcomes. The scholars trained at Maiden
Castle (Xia Nai, Sankalia, and others) left with specific technical skills that
they deployed according to their own scholarly agendas, modifying, extending,
and in some cases contradicting Wheeler's interpretive framework. The ASI
directorship, by contrast, attempted to reform Indian archaeology from within —
and produced, alongside genuine technical improvements, the Aryan invasion
thesis that became one of the most contested and ultimately discredited
interpretations in the history of South Asian archaeology.
The irony is structural: the
'indirect' model of knowledge transfer, which gave non-Western scholars maximum
freedom to adapt what they learned, produced more durable and more
intellectually generative results than the 'direct' model, which imposed British
institutional standards on a colonial archaeological establishment. This
finding has implications beyond the history of archaeology: it suggests that
the long-term productivity of knowledge transfer depends less on the
comprehensiveness of the methods transmitted than on the freedom available to
the recipients to adapt those methods to their own problems, materials, and
intellectual traditions.
VI. Conclusion: Towards a Genuinely Global History of Archaeology
This article has argued, on
the basis of a systematic three-way comparison, that the history of
archaeological knowledge transfer between Britain and non-Western societies in
the 1930s and 1940s cannot be adequately captured by either the 'epistemic imperialism'
model (which posits one-way transfer from a dominant centre to a passive
periphery) or the nationalist counter-narrative (which insists on the radical
autonomy of non-Western scholarly traditions). What the evidence reveals,
rather, is a messy, multi-directional, structurally asymmetric but genuinely
bi-directional process of knowledge exchange, in which non-Western scholars
played active, critical, and in some cases decisive roles.
Three specific contributions
of this comparative analysis to the New Imperial History of archaeology deserve
emphasis. First, the importance of differentiating between colonial and
semi-colonial contexts: the Chinese case, in which scholars operated without a
colonial archaeological administration, offers a different and in some ways
cleaner test of the agency model than the Indian case. Second, the significance
of gender as an analytical category: Zeng Zhaoyu's trajectory, which combined
British and German training, a museological rather than field-archaeological
focus, and a gendered institutional career, represents a dimension of the
history of non-Western archaeology that has been insufficiently theorised.
Third, the value of attending to the non-publication of non-Western
contributions: the seventy-one-year gap between Xia Nai's thesis completion and
its publication is not a biographical quirk but a structural symptom of the
asymmetries of the global academic publishing system, asymmetries that the history
of the discipline needs to name, analyse, and correct.
The scene at Maiden Castle
in August 1936 — two young Asian archaeologists learning stratigraphic method
in a Dorset field — is not primarily a scene of cultural subordination. It is a
scene of active, intelligent appropriation, conducted by scholars who knew
exactly what they wanted, had a clear sense of how it fitted into their own
scholarly agendas, and were capable, as their subsequent careers demonstrated,
of contributing to and in some cases correcting the tradition from which they
were learning. To write the history of that scene as one of simple transmission
is to reproduce the intellectual errors of the centre-periphery model. To write
it as one of complex negotiation, selective appropriation, and
multi-directional exchange is to begin to write a genuinely global history of
the discipline.
References
Primary Sources
Xia Nai. Diary (日記), 1935–1943. Cited from:
《夏鼐日記》全十卷. Shanghai: East China Normal University Press, 2011.
Xia Nai [Shiah, Nai]. 'A Chinese Parallel to
an Egyptian Idiom.' Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 24.1 (1938): 127–128.
Xia Nai [Shiah, Nai]. 'Some Remarks on the
Bekhen-Stone.' Annales du Service des Antiquites de l'Egypte 41 (1942):
189–205.
Xia Nai. Ancient Egyptian Beads.
Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer; Beijing: SSAP, 2014 [PhD UCL 1946; thesis
completed 1943].
中文期刊論文（均可於中國知網 CNKI 下載）
[1]
夏鼐：《五四運動和中國近代考古學的興起》，《考古》1979年第3期，第193頁。（CNKI可下載）[Xia Nai, The May Fourth
Movement and the Rise of Modern Chinese Archaeology, Kaogu, 1979(3), p. 193.]
[2]
夏鼐：《關於考古學上文化的定名問題》，《考古》1959年第4期，第170頁。（CNKI可下載）[Xia Nai, On the Problem of
Naming Archaeological Cultures, Kaogu, 1959(4), p. 170.]
[3]
王仲殊：《夏鼐先生簡介》，《考古》1985年第8期，第677頁。（CNKI可下載）[Wang Zhongshu, A Brief Account of Mr
Xia Nai, Kaogu, 1985(8), p. 677.]
[4]
王世民：《夏鼐與新中國考古學》，《考古學報》2020年第3期，第1頁。（CNKI可下載）[Wang Shimin, Xia Nai and
Archaeology of New China, Acta Archaeologica Sinica, 2020(3), p. 1.]
[5]
王世民、王仲殊：《夏鼐先生的治學之路》，《考古》2010年第2期。（CNKI可下載）[Wang Shimin and Wang Zhongshu, Mr
Xia Nai-s Path of Scholarly Formation, Kaogu, 2010(2).]
[6]
湯惠生：《夏鼐、蘇秉琦兩個考古學不同取向辨析》，《南方文物》2020年第6期，第1—4頁。（CNKI可下載）[Tang Huisheng, Divergent
Scholarly Orientations of Xia Nai and Su Bingqi, Nanfang Wenwu, 2020(6), pp.
1-4.]
[7]
王興：《夏鼐與中國馬克思主義史學的古史建構》，《歷史研究》2023年第5期。（CNKI可下載）[Wang Xing, Xia Nai and the
Construction of Ancient History in Chinese Marxist Historiography, Lishi
Yanjiu, 2023(5).]
[8]
陳星燦：《中國考古學史上的外國人》，《考古》1997年第7期，第16頁。（CNKI可下載）[Chen Xingcan, Foreigners in the
History of Chinese Archaeology, Kaogu, 1997(7), p. 16.]
[9]
陳星燦：《中國考古學的歷史與現狀》，《世界歷史》2002年第2期。（CNKI可下載）[Chen Xingcan, History and Current
State of Chinese Archaeology, Shijie Lishi, 2002(2).]
[10]
蘇秉琦：《建國以來考古工作的幾點回顧》，《考古》1981年第4期。（CNKI可下載）[Su Bingqi, Some Reflections on
Archaeological Work since the Founding of the PRC, Kaogu, 1981(4).]
[11]
王巍等：《中國考古學的發展與〈考古〉的歷程》，《考古》2015年第12期。（CNKI可下載）[Wang Wei et al., The Development
of Chinese Archaeology and the Journal Kaogu, Kaogu, 2015(12).]
[12]
朱乃誠：《中國文明起源研究的歷史與現狀》，《中國史研究動態》2003年第2期。（CNKI可下載）[Zhu Naicheng, History and
Current State of Research on the Origins of Chinese Civilization, Zhongguo Shi
Yanjiu Dongtai, 2003(2).]
[13]
夏鼐：《碳-14測定年代和中國史前考古學》，《考古》1977年第4期，第217頁。（CNKI可下載）[Xia Nai, Radiocarbon Dating
and Chinese Prehistoric Archaeology, Kaogu, 1977(4), p. 217.]
Secondary Sources
Ballantyne, Tony, and Antoinette Burton, eds.
Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.
Burton, Antoinette, ed. After the Imperial
Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation. Durham: Duke University Press,
2003.
Chang, K. C. 'Xia Nai (1910–1985).' American
Anthropologist 88.2 (1986): 442–444.
Diaz-Andieu, Margarita. A World History of
Nineteenth-Century Archaeology: Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Past. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007.
Doyon, Wendy. 'Xia Nai's Egypt in the
Archaeology of China: Field Workers and Field Methods in Xia Nai's Diary at
Armant, Egypt, 1938.' In Addressing Diversity: Inclusive Histories of
Egyptology, ed. H. Navratilova et al. Munster: Zaphon, 2023, 509–534.
Hamilakis, Yannis. The Nation and Its Ruins:
Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007.
Krishnan, Sanjay. 'H. D. Sankalia
(1908–1989).' American Anthropologist 92.4 (1990): 1006–1010.
Lester, Alan. Imperial Networks: Creating
Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain. London: Routledge,
2001.
Quirke, Stephen. 'Preface: On Receiving Xia
Nai's Ancient Egyptian Beads in the Twenty-First Century.' In Xia Nai, Ancient
Egyptian Beads. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer, 2014, vii–x.
Sankalia, H. D. Archaeology of Gujarat.
Bombay: Natwarlal, 1941.
Sankalia, H. D. 'The Training Was Brief.'
Autobiographical account, cited in Wikipedia article on H. D. Sankalia
(accessed 2026).
Shepherd, Nick, and Stephen Robins, eds. New
South African Keywords. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008.
Stevenson, Alice. 'The Largest and the Only
Fully Dated Collection: Xia Nai and Egyptian Beads.' In The Petrie Museum of
Egyptian Archaeology: Characters and Collections, ed. Alice Stevenson. London:
UCL Press, 2015, 106–108.
Trigger, Bruce. 'Alternative Archaeologies:
Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist.' Man 19.3 (1984): 355–370.
Wheeler, R. E. M. 'Harappa 1946: The Defences
and Cemetery R-37.' Ancient India 3 (1947): 59–130.
Wheeler, R. E. M. Maiden Castle, Dorset.
London: Society of Antiquaries of London, 1943.
Zeng Zhaoyu and Li Ji. 博物館 [Museums].
Chongqing: Cheng Chung Book Co., 1943.
