William Meacham

William Meacham (Chinese: 秦維廉) is an American archaeologist living and working in Hong Kong since 1970. Meacham has written several books on archaeology in southern China.[1]

In 1977, he published an article on South China archaeology in the journal Current Anthropology,[2] opposing the then general consensus that innovations spread south from the Central Plains of North China. This "nuclear area hypothesis" was promoted by Kwang-chih Chang, the prominent doyen of ancient China archaeology. In 2000, in a preface to his own Festschrift, Chang acknowledged: "On the concept of 'Regional Cultures,' I was very much a late-comer. Judith Treistman (1972) and William Meacham (1977) were both pioneers on this question."[3]

Meacham has written several papers[4] and a book[5] on the restoration of the Shroud of Turin in 2002, where Meacham is questioning the restoration methods used by the Catholic Church.

He recently conducted a successful search to locate a Confederate burial ground of 227 soldiers in Hopkinsville, Kentucky.[6] .[7] In researching the epidemic that killed these soldiers encamped at Hopkinsville in 1861, Meacham developed a hypothesis that the disease, at the time called "Black Measles", was influenza. He published a lengthy article on the subject.[8]

References
  1. from a presentation of Meacham when presenting an article at the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine at The University of Hong Kong
  2. Continuity and local evolution in the Neolithic of South China: a non-nuclear approach. Current Anthropology. by William Meacham. 1977 18(3): 419-440
  3. Reflections on Chinese Archaeology in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century. Journal of East Asian Archaeology. by Kwang-Chih Chang. 2001 3(1):5-19
  4. William Meacham, "The Authentication of the Turin Shroud, An Issue in Archeological Epistemology", Current Anthropology, 1983 24(3): 283-311
  5. William Meacham, "The Rape of the Turin Shroud", 2005, ISBN 1-4116-5769-1
  6. initial report in the Washington Times
  7. latest report by Nashville TV station
  8. William Meacham, Was measles a powerful killer, as widely believed, during the Civil War? Journal of Civil War Medicine 17, 4, 2013


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