The turmoil and rapid ideological changes within China during the early twentieth century influenced the development of modern archaeology in the country in important ways. In this paper, we point to how various trends worked together to create a need for a new deep past as the existing historiographic accounts were rejected. Within this context, Western scientific methods and expertise were welcome and they came to play seminal roles in the discovery of the deep past and the development of new field methods. The paper focuses on the Swede Johan Gunnar Andersson and his role in the discovery of the Neolithic in the form of the Yangshao Culture. We argue that beyond the discovery itself, Andersson introduced a geologist’s mindset and way of reasoning about physical geological relations. The paradigm shift that is commonly associated with the early beginning of modern archaeology in China was thus strongly influenced by geology.