Talk:Zou Heng/GA1

GA Review

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Nominator: Generalissima (talk · contribs) 23:43, 29 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Reviewer: UndercoverClassicist (talk · contribs) 06:45, 1 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'll have a look at this. Caveat that I don't speak Chinese, and indeed had never heard of Zou before picking up the article, but I do have a background in archaeology that will, I hope, be helpful.

Will give it a read through and make some general/quick-fix comments before looking at images, copyvio and sourcing. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 06:45, 1 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

eventually settling in Santai County, Sichuan, where he graduated from middle school. He briefly enrolled in Peking University: I'm not familiar with the Chinese education system, but it sounds as if he skipped a stage (high school?) in the middle. Is that right?
- Infuriatingly, "middle school" is grades 8-12, what would be middle and high school in a US context. I added a footnote for this. - G
field excavations in Luoyang and the Erligang site. : and at the Erligang site.
- Fixed. - G
I would clarify that the National Museum of Asian Art is in the United States, rather than China.
- Fixed. - G
We call it the Shimada Prize in the lead but the Shimada Award in the infobox. Is this definitely a notable enough award to get such high billing?
- Corrected to Prize and linked, that's just the name. - G
Zou was born on January 30, 1927 in : comma after 1927.
- Fixed. - G
recognizing that the nascent Communist government would replace the Republic's law codes: I think this could perhaps do with a bit more fleshing out, for readers who don't know their Chinese history: what was the Republic and where had this new Communist government come from? On another note, this follows from transferred to the History department during the Chinese Civil War, but seems to imply that the war was (effectively) over by the time he made the decision.
Any chance of some links in Han tombs at Shaogou, Luoyang -- and perhaps a date for the Han dynasty?
He reconstructed a number of pottery vessels from sherds, a relatively new technique in Chinese archaeology: this surprised me, as it was an old technique in European archaeology. Do you know the story as to when and how it entered Chinese practice?
In 1955, he graduated from Peking University, becoming the first person to earn a Doctoral Candidate degree (equivalent to a PhD) in archaeology since the foundation of the People's Republic: I think we need a date on the founding of the PRC (it was six years before). Any idea why nobody had done so earlier?
During the late 1950s, he: generally, we would restate the name at the beginning of a new paragraph or section.

More to follow -- greatly enjoying it so far. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 06:45, 1 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

identifying it with the ancient capital of the Yan state: identifying it as?
- Fixed. - G
During this time, he successfully saved: suggest cutting successfully as WP:PUFFERY (it's implied in saved)
- Fixed. - G
He published various major works immediately after the end of the revolution: is this the Cultural Revolution? What's the date we're imagining here?
- Clarified this a bit. - G
Zou was not named as the author of the book due to the significant contribution from earlier archaeologists: not sure this sentence quite makes sense. Do you mean that the book was considered fundamentally to be Guo's work?
- Clarified; he wasn't listed as the author in the book. - G
"Sinologist" is usually capitalised, I think.
- I checked a bunch of other sinologists' articles, and they always seem to be lowercased. - G
Zou continued his work at Tianma-Qucun despite frequent death threats: from the looting gangs?
- Clarified.- G
American sinologist Robert Throp criticizes Marxist historiography: if it's the Marxism that he's criticising, is this really due in an article on Zou? On the other hand, if he criticised Zou's work for being overly/dogmatically/ineptly Marxist, that's a different thing and should be phrased as such.
- Rephrased. - G
Bibliography is rather short -- I found quite a bit on Google/Google Books which, while not full-scale biographies, made potentially important passing comments. Will put together a list later on.
He enrolled in Peking University as a law student the following year, but transferred to the History department: wonky capitalisation here. When in doubt, the Wikipedia MoS is usually to decapitalise.
- Fixed. - G
@UndercoverClassicist: Got to more stuff! Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 15:27, 4 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Great -- is that everything acted on now? Did you get anywhere with the bibliography? UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 16:27, 4 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
UndercoverClassicist Yeah, I added a few more sources. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 16:50, 4 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

OK, let's do a bit more:

Extra sources -- not a major point for GA, but consider the following:
- here p. 482 gives Z. as the archetype of "prior" (pre-2023?) researchers into the Shang and Xia, who used what was known about the Shang to interpret pre-Shang cultures: he gives Zou and his methods a lot of credit for achieving "fruitful results" and establishing a general consensus about a very murky period.
- here, p. 15ff has a positive early review of two of Zou's works (p. 17)
- here, pp. 305-307 and previous pages has a good bit on Zou's place in the historiographical debates around the origins of Proto-Zhou culture.
- I can't see it fully on Google Books, but there appears to be a lot here, pp. 38ff on his methods and their importance. It's Volume 22(2).
- Brief mention of his work on Bo here, p. 62
- Lots of assessment, often touching on the matters raised in the sources above, [1] here, pp. 163-166.
- Quite a bit in [2] here (search "Zou Heng") on the Xia-Shang-Zhou project.
- Searching his name here gives an assessment as "a leading figure in archaeology in China", and it's quite a big-name source for such an assessment.
Partly related to the above: again, not a serious problem for GA, but I feel that we're missing a real statement about Zou's legacy/impact/assessment, which is pretty standard in a good scholarly biography. Could the "historiography" section be expanded into "Assessment" or similar?
How does "Zhou, Ying" write their name in English? If they put the family name first (Zhou Ying) I would put both names in the |author= parameter to avoid inadvertently squashing it into the western order.
American sinologist Robert Throp: Thorp?
von Falkenhausen mentions a detailed biography and bibliography of Zou at the end of his Festschrift: do you have access to that?
I think it would be useful to gesture at the very illustrious list of Zou's teachers mentioned in von Falkenhausen p. 182, perhaps picking out the most famous or most relevant to archaeology.
Might be worth a mention that Z. never joined the Communist party, which may help to explain the political persecution?
I think we've slightly misrepresented Goodrich, who criticises Thorp's diagnosis as to the damage done by Marxism in Z.'s work -- it's not just that Zou later became less Marxist, but he argues that his work is fundamentally built along western-friendly lines (see p. 38: Zou's ordering of the facts is not all that different from Western archaeological practice. For Western archaeologists, like Zou, prefer an explanatory to a descriptive ordering of facts, and like Zou, cast their explanations in terms of social evolution. Evolutionism in Western archaeology shares roots in common with Marxism, and has been specifically inspired by Marxism (and even Soviet archaeology) through the contributions of Gordon Childe.Western archaeologists, there fore, will be less swift than Thorp to dismiss Zou's interpretations simply on grounds of his Marxism

Images

Only one image, clearly fair use. No chance of any relevant sites/finds/artefacts from any of the cultures he worked on?
No evidence of copyvio, BLP or other serious concerns.

Spot checks to follow. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 07:03, 5 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Spot checks

Note 2 checks out, though I think only p. 182 is needed.
Note 3: we have that he contributed to the report, which usually means that he wrote a chapter of it: the source says that his role was in compiling it, which wouldn't normally be covered by the same term.
Note 6 checks, though you could add p. 181, as the cited material doesn't explicitly say that the post was at Peking.
Note 14 checks, subject to the quibble above.
- @Generalissima: did you get anywhere with these? UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 09:36, 24 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]