Su Bingqi
Chinese archaeologist
Su Bingqi (Chinese: 苏秉琦; Wade–Giles: Su Ping-ch'i; 1909 – 30 June 1997) was a Chinese archaeologist and co-founder of Peking University's archaeology program. He was China's major archaeological theoretician for 50 years, and regarded in his later years as the paramount authority on the archaeology of China. He was best known for his "regional systems and cultural types" (区系类型) model of Chinese Neolithic cultural development, which rejected the traditional view of Chinese culture radiating from the core Central Plain region. The model has since been widely adopted. It was further developed by Kwang-chih Chang as the Chinese Interaction Sphere model.
Biography
Su was born in 1909 in Gaoyang County, Hebei Province. From 1928 to 1934 he studied history at Beijing Normal University. After graduating, he joined the Institute of Historical Studies at the Peiping Academy (a predecessor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences) and worked on its excavation team at the Doujitai archaeological site in Baoji, Shaanxi Province, where he spent three years, from 1934 to 1937, under the guidance of senior archaeologist Xu Xusheng, who had a significant influence on him. Su completed the excavation report in 1945, but it was published only in 1948.
In 1940, Su wrote a book analyzing the types of li (鬲) pottery tripods excavated at Doujitai, but lost the manuscript in the chaos of the Second Sino-Japanese War.
The public source identifies “Su Bingqi” as chinese archaeologist. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Bingqi, Chinese and archaeologist.
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This entry incorporates text from “Su Bingqi” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.