Abstract

In collaboration with International Womens’ Day Event.

This event is in person but livestreamed free here: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIkd-GuqDMpHdSEt5XRFSz5zH6iKXfuB86L

Abstract: The year 2021 has been declared the centenary anniversary of Chinese archaeology, leading to a flood of talks, conferences, and publications on the history of the discipline. The stories told there, however, and the scholars appearing at related events, are nearly exclusively male, even though there were notable women among the earliest Chinese archaeologists and the number of female students in the field has increased dramatically over the years. This talk provides an overview of the history of Chinese archaeology from the perspective of women, starting from the earliest pioneers during the first half of the 20th century, then moving on to the Mao era when women were heralded as “holding up half the sky”, the rebuilding of research and university education after the Cultural Revolution, and finally the situation of female scholars during the boom in archaeology from the 1990s to the present. Combining statistics on gender disparities in archaeological departments at universities and research institutions with individual stories, this presentation aims to identify broad patterns but also highlight individual achievements and struggles and their context, ending with some speculations on how the situation of women in archaeology and society in China at large may be moving.