Festschrift in Honor of K.C. Chang
Editors’ Preface, JEAA (Volume 1, Number 1-4, 1999)

We are proud to inaugurate the new Journal of East Asian Archaeology with a special volume in honor of Kwang-chih Chang, John E. Hudson Professor emeritus at Harvard University and formerly Vice President of the Academia Sinica, Taipei. This dedication appears to us a most fitting one, as Professor Chang, known to his friends and colleagues as K. C. — has undoubtedly done more than any other single person in the second half the twentieth century to establish the archaeology of East Asia in Western academia, both within the anthropological discipline and in the consciousness of the scholarly public at large.

This new international journal, addressed to scholars and students as well as a broader public audience, strives to pursue further K. C.’s lifelong goals at a time when the ever-growing volume of discoveries makes it increasingly difficult for any one person to keep abreast with East Asian archaeology. We see its main tasks in heightening the international visibility of the archaeological work done in this area of the world, bringing out its importance in a cross-cultural comparative context, and breaking through the language barrier that has often kept East Asian archaeology hermetically closed to nonspecialist scholars. In a time when the study of East Asian archaeology is showing some modest expansion in Western academic institutions, we hope that this journal will help draw more first-rate talent into this exciting and, so far, underexposed field.

This journal will publish original scholarship, in English, on all aspects of East Asian archaeology. It principally addresses two audiences. On the one hand, it intends to convince colleagues in the wider East Asian Studies community of the relevance of archaeology; on the other hand, and perhaps even more importantly, its aim is to heighten the interest of archaeologists and anthropologists working in fields other than East Asia in the significant contributions that archaeology in East Asia has to make to the discipline as a whole. A third and most immediate target audience of the journal are specialists already working in various subfields of East Asian archaeology, in East Asia as well as elsewhere. In this connection, the Journal of East Asian Archaeology hopes to overcome the lamentable fragmentation of the field, where scholars—regardless of whether they are based in East Asia or not—often have little if any awareness of what is going on in neighboring areas. “East Asia” is here broadly defined as including China, Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia, Mongolia, Siberia, and the adjacent regions of Central Asia. This is the first journal explicitly devoted to the archaeology of this larger geographical area; one may hope that the broad geographic focus will encourage scholars to take a wider view of archaeology in East Asia than is possible with the single-country or single-area orientation characteristic of most currently-appearing publications in the field.

In refraining purposefully from setting a chronological limit to the journal’s coverage, we wish to throw open for discussion the notion that the archaeological discipline should limit itself to a specific timespan. We hope to encourage the application of archaeological research methods to the study of evidence from any period, including relatively recent epochs that, in East Asian countries, have traditionally been considered as extraneous to the archaeological endeavor. In general, the Journal of East Asian Archaeology aspires to bridge the disciplines and to bring together a multitude of approaches, doing justice to the enormous riches that East Asia has to offer to archaeological inquiry.

The spirit of openness and inclusiveness in which this journal is being launched owes its fundamental inspiration to the living example of the dedicatee. The extraordinarily wide range of K. C. Chang’s intellectual interests is evident from the bibliography of his works, which follows this introduction (pp. 1-42). He has contributed to a staggering variety of fields; the following enumeration is by no means an exhaustive one. Having started out in palaeolithic archaeology, he subsequently became —and remains to this day —one of the principal scholars to define the methods and theories of settlement archaeology. He contributed in influential ways to the general methodological debates in archaeology during the 1960s and 1970s. He has been a key figure in building up the now-burgeoning field of Taiwanese archaeology. He has produced the standard synthesis on the archaeology of mainland China (currently being completely revised and updated for its fifth edition) —a book that has done more than any other to establish ancient China on the map of modern American anthropological consciousness. Bridging the gap between historiography and archaeology, he has pioneered the anthropological analysis of early Chinese society, and he has written a classic, multidisciplinary study of Shang civilization. He has also variously framed the genesis of Chinese civilization in broader comparative terms. More successfully than any other scholar, K. C. has brought the methods of modern anthropology to bear on the study of East Asian civilization. Indeed, if the study of East Asian archaeology in Western academia has recently been on an ascendant trajectory, this has been in large measure due to his efforts. In fulfilling its above-defined mission, the present journal will be following in the trails that K. C. has blazed.

But the inspiration of K. C. does not lie merely in his published works, or in the contemplation of his distinguished academic career. Anyone who has met the man will have witnessed his kindness, his sense of humor, and his towering intelligence. Legion are those whom he has helped substantially in the course of a half-century of scholarly engagement. Those who have come to know him better are aware that his achievements have been the fruit of incredibly intense devotion and superhumanly hard work, which at length have taken a toll on his physical health. Yet as this volume is going to press, his brilliant career continues to be going strong, with K. C. fighting his debilitating illness with extraordinary determination, simultaneously directing a large-scale collaborative field project in Henan on behalf of the Peabody Museum, teaching courses at National Taiwan University, looking after his remaining Harvard Ph.D. students, writing books and articles, directing publication projects at Academia Sinica and Yale University Press, and engaging himself for just causes in Taiwanese politics. One cannot help feeling a sense of amazement. The articles here assembled are but a symbolic token of the profound inspiration of the human example set by K. C. , and of the enormous respect, admiration, and affection he commands in the hearts and minds of those who know him.

This inaugural volume, distributed over five issues of which this is the first, assembles some forty articles by K. C.’s students and close colleagues, which reflect on various aspects of the dedicatee’s interests and past contributions. In each of the five issues, we have endeavored to assemble a mix of articles by both senior and junior scholars, as well as a thematic constellation that is designed in such a way that each issue contains some articles of more theoretical bent alongside some loose groupings of articles revolving around a common theme; the one for this issue is Settlement Pattern Studies. While China may inevitably be a bit overrepresented, the volume does also comprise articles on other areas within East Asia as well as on their relations among one another, with some articles on areas outside East Asia included as well. Following K. C.’s lifelong interest, the articles included represent a healthy mix of disciplines, and several of them are explicitly comparative or theoretical in nature. It is our fervent hope that this pluralistic, interdisciplinary outlook can be maintained and expanded in future volumes of this journal.

In some respects, this inaugural volume may differ somewhat from those that follow it. For one thing, it includes only articles. In future issues, the journal hopes also to publish archaeological reports, both preliminary and final; as well as reviews, review articles, bibliographic surveys, state-of-the-field summaries, translations, news from the field, columns, correspondence, and forum sections—in short, anything that can stimulate intellectual discussion in the field or serve as an aid to further research. Moreover, this first volume, like many Festschrifen, is somewhat text-heavy. In future issues, the number of illustrations, both line drawings and photographs, will be significantly increased.

As editorial work progresses towards Volume 2, we would like to use this opportunity to solicit submissions for future issues. We shall also be thankful for any suggestions as to how any aspect of this journal could be improved. Contact addresses are provided on the impressum page; the composition of the editorial staff for the coming volumes, which is currently in the process of finalization, will be announced in a forthcoming issue.
In closing, we wish to express our gratitude to our editors at E. J. Brill, above all Dr. Albert Hoffstädt, for their help in launching the journal and their enthusiasm in producing this inaugural volume in honor of K. C. Chang; and to everyone else who have lent us their moral support and encouragement in the years during which this long-planned Festschrift has been in gestation.

August 1999
Robert E. Murowchick
Lothar von Falkenhausen
Tsang Cheng-hwa
Robin D.S. Yates