This article critiques the longstanding premise that Chinese archaeology primarily exists to “supplement written history” and argues that the discipline, by restricting itself to verifying historical texts, risks missing the true scope of archaeological inquiry—namely, uncovering the human beheviors and social dynamics behind material remains. Contrasting China's text-based historiographic orientation with Western trends in processual and postprocessual archaeologies, the author highlights how the latter's anthropological focus on economic organization, social structure, and ideology offers deeper insights into “the people behind the objects”. While archaeology in China greatly benefits from abundant historical documentation, it has often taken these records at face value, leading scholars to forcibly match newly unearthed data with ancient texts. The article underscores that “reconstructing national history” cannot succeed merely through artifact classification and chronology or the so-called Due Evidence method. Archaeologists must adopt systematic theories, new analytical methods, and multidisciplinary approaches to transform raw data into historical knowledge. By integrating theories of cultural ecology, system theory, site-formation processes, and middle-range research, Chinese archaeology can better serve its ultimate goal of understanding the past—thereby evolving from a passive branch of historiography into a robust historical science in its own right.