FRAGMENTARY MEMORIES OF MY FATHER
回忆父亲生活和工作中的几个片断

My father Pei Wenzhong died 20 years ago. In memory of my father, introduced here are some fragments of his activities. On January 19, 1904, he was born in a village in Hebei Province. In 1921, he came to Peking to study at Peking University. During his work study program, he wrote novels which were once commended by the famous Chinese writer Lu Xun. He was graduated from the Department of Geology, Peking University in 1927, and began his professional career at Zhoukoudian in 1928. Directed by Yang Zhongjian, B. Bohlin and P. Teilhard de Chardin, his theoretical bases and practical skills in archaeology were growing up. On December 2, 1929, the first intact skullcap of Peking Man ( Sininthropus ) was discovered at Zhoukoudian, and some stone artifacts were also found there in 1931. Thanks to his findings, the academic society recognized that Peking Man could utilize fire as well as make stone artifacts, based on which the ape man period has been acknowledged in the human evolution. In the summer of 1935, he left for Paris to study archaeology, obtained a Ph.D. in 1937, and came back to China soon. Due to the Anti Japanese War, the excavations at Zhuokoudian were suspended till the establishment of the People′s Republic of China. In 1966, the Zhuokoudian′s excavations were in progress, and a piece of occipital bone and two pieces of frontal bone were found on May 4 and 5, respectively. Coincidentally, they turned out to be the same body found in 1934. My father took great interests in the fieldwork and excavations. The hard condition could never spoil his enthusiasms in his work. In 1981 he had cerebral thrombus and was in hospital, where his leaders and colleagues gave him great care. On September 18, 1982, father, who dedicated the whole life to his work and thought about China′s archaeological studies even at the deathbed, died in Beijing at the age of 79. During the past 20 years, great advances have been made in the researches on paleoanthropology and Quaternary. In 1987, the UNESCO listed Zhoukoudian, like the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, as one of the sites of the world cultural heritages. In 2001, his last book entitled A Study on the Lithic Artifacts of Sininthropus received an honorary award from the First Guo Moruo′s historic award, all of these good news could comfort my late father′s soul.