Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies: Whose Past Matters? Media Biases and the Politics of Discovery with Archaeologist Rowan Flad
The Department of Anthropology at Harvard University is pleased to share a post from the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies highlighting Professor Rowan Flad’s work on uncovering and addressing media biases in archaeological news coverage.
The work done by archaeologists reveals truths and raises more questions about the vast unexplored history of the human race. It’s big-headline stuff, but those stories are necessarily filtered through the news media, documentaries, and museum exhibitions before they reach the public imagination. All of this makes the decision of which discoveries get amplified that much more crucial, and profoundly consequential—shaping not only popular perceptions of cultural value but also the political stakes of whose past is deemed globally significant.
Four years ago, it was these concerns that motivated Rowan Flad, John E. Hudson Professor of Archaeology at Harvard University, to pen an op-ed for the Washington Post noting the lavish coverage of Egyptian discoveries compared with the silence surrounding equally spectacular finds in China. That observation sparked a collaborative study with Bridget Alex (Ph.D. ’16), Lecturer in Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, and Jenny Ji, a Ph.D. candidate in bioengineering at Stanford University, which has now borne fruit: a July, 2025, analysis in Science Advances of more than 1,100 peer-reviewed articles and their coverage in 15 major U.S. news outlets confirms that research on China and Taiwan is indeed consistently underrepresented. In response to the study’s findings, we asked Professor Flad to reflect on how and why his own career has become focused on this issue—namely, the uneven media attention paid to sites like Sanxingdui, the Bronze Age archaeological site in China’s Sichuan province; the broader biases that the disparity reveals; and implications for scholarship, cultural exchange, and cross-Pacific understanding.