Guo Ming is an archaeologist specializing in the archaeology of the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties in China, with a particular focus on architecture and bronzes from this period. She received her Ph.D. from the School of Archaeology and Museology at Peking University in 2013, where she studied the architecture of the Yellow River Valley during the Shang and Zhou dynasties in China under the supervision of Prof. Liu Xu. She has worked as a researcher at the Sichuan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, and as a postdoctoral researcher at the School of History and Culture, Shandong University, and she is currently an associate professor at the Institute for the History of Global Civilizations, Shanghai International Studies University.
Her research is based on archaeological excavation data, and she has summarized the morphological features, detailed structures, construction processes and methods, building materials, functional properties, and locations in settlements of various types of buildings in the Shang and Zhou dynasties, and explored the epochal changes of Shang and Zhou architecture on this basis, putting forward more new points of view, and arriving at some new understandings on some issues that have not yet been paid attention to by academics or not studied in sufficient depth, which is the most comprehensive and systematic exposition on the study of Shang and Zhou architecture so far.
She has published a series of papers on the architecture of the Shang and Zhou dynasties, focusing on such important issues as large-scale monolithic buildings, courtyard buildings, the central axis of buildings, government treasuries, tortoise chambers, and buildings on tombs, etc. She believes that there existed epochal and territorial differences between the architecture of the Shang Dynasty and that of the Zhou Dynasty, and that such differences were reflected in the spatial layout of the buildings, their structure, technology, and the relationship between the buildings and settlements, etc. The above discussion is the first systematic, comprehensive, and detailed study of such issues; in particular, it combines the architecture in the spatial and temporal contexts with the related relics and relics for comparative analysis, which makes the study more in-depth and the conclusions more credible. Her research results on pre-Qin architecture have attracted the attention of her counterparts and have been highly praised.
She has participated in the excavation of the Zhougong Temple site in Shaanxi, the Dabaozi Mountain site in Gansu Province, and the Sanxingdui site in Sichuan, and has also participated in important archaeological topics in Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties, such as Erlitou Ruins, Panlong City Ruins, Sanxingdui Ruins, and early stone bells. She has also been involved in the compilation of the bronze catalogue on several occasions.
During her visit to the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, she hopes to further explore and deepen how to better carry out architectural research in ancient China, both theoretically and methodologically.