Asian archaeology—or more precisely, East Asian archaeology—has been a lonely child in the great family of world archaeology. The noticeable rarity of academic positions in Asian archaeology in American institutions is a good and unfortunate reminder of the “insignificance” of the region to the world's archaeological community, which has little understanding of Asia's importance. However, East Asian countries, let's say China, is putting out perhaps the largest volume of archaeological reports that any single nation can manage to produce each year. And the unfortunate and unexaggerated point is that the many archaeological and even anthropological models and theories that the world has come to embrace so far are based only on partial evidence. Therefore, we must understand the late Professor K. C. Chang's call that the Chinese data (or broadly Asian data) must serve to test existing models, as well as to formulate new models about the development of civilization...

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