David Noel Keightley

1932 - 2017

David Noel Keightley

David Noel Keightley, Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley for twenty-nine years, died February 23, 2017. He was 84 years old.

Professor Keightley was born in London in 1932 to Walter A. Keightley and Jeanne G. Desoutter and was educated in boarding schools during WWII. His family moved to Evanston, IL in 1947. A graduate of Amherst College, he studied Medieval French at the University of Lille as a Fulbright Student and received his MA in modern European history at New York University. After a number of years working as a fiction and nonfiction editor and a freelance writer in New York City, he entered Columbia University's graduate school in 1962, receiving his PhD in East Asian History in 1969. He married Vannie Louise Traylor of Maryville, TN in 1965 and then spent two years in Taiwan in language training and research. At the end of 1967 his first son Steven was born. A second son, Richard, was born in 1970, after the family's move to California.

A member of the Berkeley faculty from 1969 to 1998, and a specialist in China's earliest historical documents, Professor Keightley was the author of Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China (1978) and The Ancestral Landscape: Time, Space, and Community in Late Shang China, ca. 1200-1045 B.C. (2000); he edited The Origins of Chinese Civilization (1983). One of the founders and editors of the journal Early China, he published over fifty articles dealing with religion and history of the Chinese Neolithic and Bronze Ages.

Professor Keightley visited the People's Republic of China seven times as a research scholar between 1975 and 1991 and helped organize two international conferences with Chinese archaeologists, one on "Shang Civilization" in 1982, the other on "Ancient China and Social Science Generalizations" in 1986. Professor Keightley received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 1986; he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000. Nationally, he served on various committees involved in Chinese academic exchanges and scholarship, including the American Council of Learned Societies and the Committee for Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China. At UC Berkeley, he served as Chairman of Berkeley's Center for Chinese Studies from 1988 to 1990 and as Chair of the UC Berkeley History Department from 1992 to 1994, and as Interim Director of the East Asian Library from 1999-2000. His final two books are Working for His Majesty (2012), an exhaustively researched, exactingly executed "pointilliste" portrait of the ancestral landscape of the Shang people, and These Bones Shall Rise Again (2014), a collection of essays spanning more than thirty years covering authority, cosmology, history, magic, myth, worship, and writing—in short, the very antecedents of Chinese civilization.

He is survived by his wife Vannie, of Oakland; by son Steven and his wife Mari; and by son Richard and his wife Robin, and two grandchildren, Sophie and Preston.

Memorial Service will be held at Sunset View Mortuary, junction of Colusa and Fairmount Avenues in El Cerrito, CA on Saturday, March 25, 2017 at 11:00 a.m.