Sino-French Archaeological Team in Northeast China (MAFNEC)

Partnership with the Research Centre on Chinese Frontier Archaeology at Jilin University and Jilin Province Archaeological Research Institute.

Principal Investigators : Pauline Sebillaud, CNRS researcher, CRCAO UMR 8155, JING Zhongwei, Professor, Jilin University, Research Centre on Chinese Frontier Archaeology.

The Sino-French Archaeological Team in Northeast China (MAFNEC) is made up of senior researchers, young archaeologists and doctoral students from different teams from CNRS (CRCAO, Archéorient, ArScan, MNHN) and INRAP.

Specializing in the archeology of marginal areas, this team’s research focuses on Northeast of China, particularly on Jilin province. Located in the center of Northeast Asia, it is one of the areas where the oldest ceramic containers in the world appeared, along with complex Neolithization processes: absence of agriculture and domestication, seasonal settlement, economy based on fishing and hunting, etc. The development of Neolithic techniques and adaptations, like the relatively late beginnings of agriculture and domestication in northeastern China, are issues that are attracting the attention of scholars around the world today. The evolution of housing patterns (nomadism, seasonality, sedentary lifestyle) and subsistence economies between 10,000 BC and the last century constitutes the core of the multidisciplinary questions of the mission.

The Sino-French team is built as symmetrically as possible: each French specialist works in pairs with his Chinese counterpart. These pairs of researchers exchange bibliographic data relating to their field, develop together the analytic protocols most suited to the discoveries they are supervising, train together other team members and students, and write publications. Relations are created during the visits of the various members of the mission to France and China, the aim is to create privileged long-term relationships between specialists in the same field.

MAFNEC’s activities are documented in the academic blog : https://mafnec.hypotheses.org/