Scientific archaeology sharpens the lens on China's past

In 1959, Chinese archaeologist Xia Nai handed researchers Qiu Shihua and Cai Lianzhen a copy of Radiocarbon Dating, a book by American scientist Willard Libby, which sparked the first revolution in modern archaeology.

At the time, scientific archaeology in China was virtually uncharted territory. Yet scholars like Xia had already realized that without scientific methods, archaeology could only offer qualitative descriptions and not determine absolute dates.

That same year, Xia invited Qiu and Cai, who worked at what is now the Institute of High Energy Physics, to the Institute of Archaeology to establish China's first radiocarbon dating laboratory.

After several years of efforts from the husband-and-wife team, the laboratory produced its first batch of data in 1965. That year is regarded as the starting point of China's scientific archaeology endeavors.

Six decades later and now in their 90s, Qiu and Cai joined successive generations of scholars at a recent symposium in Beijing to reflect on the development of scientific archaeology in China and look ahead to its future.

Cai recalls that under the conditions of that time, their immediate challenge was how to translate the theory laid out in Radiocarbon Dating into workable practice. There was no ready-made laboratory equipment, so the couple had to design and build the required instruments piece by piece.

In the years following the establishment of the radiocarbon dating laboratory, Xia led efforts to promote the application of this method.