The discovery of the Neolithic Yangshao Culture in 1921 is widely held to herald the beginning of modern archaeology in China. In this paper we explore what this discovery introduced to archaeology, arguing that several factors coalesced to shape this change and its impact. One of these was the political changes at the time and the search for a new historiography. However, we argue that another formative influence was the new mindset that geology and mining introduced. We propose that the Yangshao Culture excavations became sites of ‘discipline formation’, where a new vocabulary was developed as well as a new way of ‘seeing’ the landscape.