My presentation focuses on the archaeology expedition conducted by American archaeologist Carl Bishop in China during the early twentieth century. Based on the archival material currently housed at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Smithsonian Institution Archives, the Freer Gallery of Art, and the American Museum of Natural History, it details who Bishop was, his associations with the Smithsonian institution and the Freer Gallery of Art, how the associations as such brought Bishop to China, and how—and why—Chinese archaeologist Ji Li received Bishop’s incessant support. Although the history of field science has become a thriving subfield in the history of science, I argue that what concerns researchers largely remains what scientists in history had done in the field, instead of how they had constructed a site as a field for science. I argue that as long as researchers can scrutinize what constitutes a field from an ontological viewpoint, instead of confining themselves to what takes place in the field as if the field were merely a stage, they could better answer why “field” becomes such an important site for producing scientific knowledge.
