Zhang Changshou


Zhang Changshou was a Chinese archaeologist who served as vice director of the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He was a corresponding member of the German Archaeological Institute and an honorary member of the CASS.

Life and career

Zhang was born 6 May 1929 in Shanghai, Republic of China. He studied in Christian missionary schools as a child and entered St. John's University, Shanghai in 1948. He transferred to Yenching University in Beijing in 1950, graduating in July 1952 with a degree in history. He taught at Liancheng Secondary School, an affiliated school of Tsinghua University, for the next four years.
In July 1956, he transferred to the Institute of Archaeology, then under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and spent the rest of his career in field archaeology and research of the Shang and Zhou dynasties of ancient China. He was promoted to associate professor in 1979 and full professor and doctoral advisor in 1986. Li Feng was one of the archaeologists he trained at the institute. He served as vice director of the Institute of Archaeology from July 1985 to May 1988. He retired in May 1989, but continued to publish for decades afterwards.
Zhang became a corresponding member of the German Archaeological Institute in December 1988, and was elected an honorary member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 2006.
He died on 30 January 2020 at Tiantan Hospital in Beijing, aged 90.

Contributions

Zhang participated in many excavation projects with a research focus on the Shang and Zhou dynasties, especially early Zhou sites in the Fenghao region such as the Western Zhou cemetery at Zhangjiapo and the predynastic Zhou site of Fengxi. His excavation report of the Zhangjiapo cemetery, published in 1999, won the first prize of the Outstanding Research Award of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 2002. He was also the chief editor of the book Chinese Archaeology—Zhou Dynasty, which won the 2007 Guo Moruo Chinese History Prize.
Zhang was the co-principal investigator, together with Robert E. Murowchick of Boston University, of Investigations into Early Shang Civilization, a Sino-American joint field archaeology project initiated by Kwang-chih Chang of Harvard University. The focus of the investigations is Shangqiu, Henan, an area sometimes buried under more than of alluvium deposited by the Yellow River over the millennia.

Major works

;Excavation reports
;Other books
Source: