A century of discoveries

The boy was not supposed to be there. It was 1926, and near the excavation at Xiyin village in Shanxi province he was playing, the way children played around anything new and noisy. He overheard the villagers talking and remembered what they called the two men on the digging team: Doctor Li and Mr Yuan.

Nearly 70 years later, in 1994, a young archaeologist named Fan Wenqian, then 28, arrived at the same site for its second excavation and met a man in his 80s. The elderly man told him about the boy — himself — and the two names he had remembered since childhood. By then, his grandson was working alongside Fan on the excavation.

On Oct 15, at the 6th Xiyin Forum as part of the 5th Congress of Chinese Archaeology in Yuncheng, Shanxi, Fan, now director of the Shanxi Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, told the story. A century had passed since the first spade struck the ground at Xiyin. The boy, the names, the grandson and the young man who listened had all come together at the same place.

Located near the meeting point of Shanxi, Henan and Shaanxi provinces, Xiyin sits in the heart of the region where Yangshao culture, the key Neolithic culture of northern China dating back 5,000 to 7,000 years, took root and grew. Xiyin was not only a regional central settlement of Neolithic Yangshao culture but also continued in use into the Shang Dynasty (c. 16th century-11th century BC), making it a prehistoric site with a long history and rich cultural deposits.

"Doctor Li" and "Mr Yuan", as remembered by the villager, were archaeologist Li Ji (1896-1979), who is regarded as "the father of Chinese archaeology", and geologist Yuan Fuli (1893-1987). A century ago, it was Li and Yuan who led the first excavation at the site, also the first modern scientific archaeological excavation independently led by Chinese scholars.

Zheng Yuan, deputy director of the Shanxi institute, says the site's century-long research journey mirrors the development of Chinese archaeology.