William Meacham

William Meacham (Chinese: 秦維廉) is an American archaeologist living and working in Hong Kong since 1970. Meacham has written several books on archaeology in southern China.^[1]

In 1977, he published an article on South China archaeology in the journal Current Anthropology,^[2] opposing the then general consensus that innovations spread south from the Central Plains of North China. This "nuclear area hypothesis" was promoted by Kwang-chih Chang, the prominent doyen of ancient China archaeology. In 2000, in a preface to his own Festschrift, Chang acknowledged: "On the concept of 'Regional Cultures,' I was very much a late-comer. Judith Treistman (1972) and William Meacham (1977) were both pioneers on this question."^[3]

Meacham has written several papers^[4] and a book^[5] on the restoration of the Shroud of Turin in 2002, where Meacham is questioning the restoration methods used by the Catholic Church.

He located a Confederate burial ground of 227 soldiers in Hopkinsville, Kentucky.^[6][7] In researching the epidemic that killed these soldiers encamped at Hopkinsville in 1861, Meacham developed a hypothesis that the disease, at the time called "Black Measles", was influenza. He published a lengthy article on the subject.^[8]