Concept
Corinne Debaine-Francfort is a French archaeologist and sinologist, a researcher at the CNRS specialised in the archaeology on Eastern Central Asia (Sinkiang or East Turkestan) and in the protohistory of north-west China. Debaine-Francfort has been a Doctor of Far Eastern studies at Paris Diderot University (Paris 7) since 1989 and research director at CNRS since 1995. She is a member of a team carrying out research on Central Asia. She has taken part in various archaeological expeditions in this region, and in the first Sino-foreign excavation to be authorized by China since 1949. Since 1995 she has been co-director of the Franco-Chinese archaeological mission to Sinkiang. In 2014, she received the Grand Prize of Archaeology from the Simone and Cino Del Duca Foundation for the archaeological mission in Sinkiang. 1997: Prix Clio pour la Recherche archéologique française à l'étranger 2004: Prix Hirayama de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 2013: Prix La Recherche, mention 'Archéologie', pour le programme « Bio-archéologie » de la Mission archéologique franco-chinoise au Sinkiang 2014: Grand Prix d'archéologie de la Fondation Simone et Cino del Duca 2015: Chevalier dans l'Ordre national du Mérite La redécouverte de la Chine ancienne (lit. 'The Rediscovery of Ancient China'; English-language edition: The Search for Ancient China) is a pocket-sized book on archaeology of China published by Éditions Gallimard in 1998 in the Archéologie series of their Découvertes collection. Debaine-Francfort starts this archaeological journey with the "Birth of Archaeology in China" (chap. I), followed by chapters devoted to the artefacts and other findings of the Neolithic Age (chap. II, "The Chinese Neolithic: From Singular to Plural"), Shang dynasty (chap. III, "The Shang: The Emergence of a Civilization"), Zhou dynasty (chap. IV, "Eight Centuries of Eventful History"), Qin dynasty (chap. V, "Qin or the First Empire") and Han dynasty (chap. VI, "The Spread of the Han Empire").