information:highlighting, structural:expansion
Archaeological discoveries

Inspired by the discovery of the late Shang capital (Yinxu) near modern Anyang, Chinese archaeologists searched the Yellow River basin for earlier capitals. In 1959, Xu Xusheng conducted a survey of the Yi – Luo basin, which he had identified from received texts as a possible location of Xia capitals.Among his discoveries was the large Bronze Age site of Erlitou near modern Yanshi. The site was an urban centre, with rammed-earth foundations of several buildings, which were interpreted as palaces or temples. Radiocarbon dating in the late 20th century had wide error margins, and placed the Erlitou culture between 2100 and 1300 BC, which fit well with the traditional dates of the Xia. Most Chinese archaeologists identify the Xia with Erlitou, while many western archaeologists argue that the identification, and indeed the very existence of Xia, is unprovable, due to the lack of testable detail in the traditional accounts. For a time, archaeologists debated which of the four phases of Erlitou should be interpreted as Xia and which as Shang.

The refined dating techniques used by the Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project produced a narrower range for the Erlitou culture of 1880 to 1520 BC. The project assigned all four phases of Erlitou to the Xia, and identified the transition to the Shang with the construction of walled cities at Yanshi and Zhengzhou around 1600 BC. Since the project had settled on a start date for the Xia of 2070 BC, based on received texts, this forced them to designate the late part of the Henan Longshan culture, including the Xinzhai phase, as the early part of the Xia period. No corresponding cultural transition in the archaeological record has yet been discovered. Even more refined carbon dating in 2005 and 2006 produced more tightly defined ranges, dating Xinzhai at 1870–1720 BC and Erlitou at 1735–1530 BC.

The only musical instruments found at Erlitou are a qing sounding stone, two small clapper bells (one earthenware, one bronze) and a xun with one finger hole. Due to this extreme scarcity of surviving instruments and the general uncertainty surrounding most of the Xia, creating a musical narrative of the period is impractical.

Archaeological evidence of a large outburst flood at Jishi Gorge that destroyed the Lajia site on the upper reaches of the Yellow River has been dated to c. 1920 BC. This date is shortly before the rise of the Erlitou culture in the middle Yellow River valley and the Yueshi culture in Shandong, following the decline of the Longshan culture in the North China Plain. The authors suggest that this flood may have been the basis for the later myth of Yu the Great, and contributed to the cultural transition into the Erlitou period. They further argue that the timing is further evidence for the identification of the Xia with the Erlitou culture. However, no evidence of contemporaneous widespread flooding in the North China Plain has yet been found.

The Cambridge History of Ancient China (1999) takes the beginning of Chinese history as the Xia's successor Shang dynasty (c. 1600 – c. 1046 BC). Xie Weiyang responded to this standpoint unfavorably towards efforts in China to link archaeological research to historical records:

The Cambridge History of Ancient China adopted this standpoint with the promise of providing a commonly accepted synthesis based on an exhaustive discussion of the latest pre-Qin material available at the end of the 1990s. This is of extraordinary significance, because if this book aims to provide a commonly accepted synthesis, then the blood, sweat, and tears of Chinese scholars over the past decade that brought about countless achievements in Xia period research will become a joke, and many Chinese scholars in the field will lose all sense of direction and not know how to get back on the right track.

However, as Chen Chun and Gong Xin point out, the debate upon the Xia dynasty's historical existence stems from different research orientations between Chinese and Western scholars. The authors assert that overseas scientific communities are hesitant to accept the results of Chinese researchers because their studies used traditional narratives of the Xia as a guide that instructed them on what to find, and because they quickly linked newly discovered artifacts, constructions and other evidences as representing the proof for the Xia's actual existence. They claim that mainland Chinese scholars focused mainly on extrapolations of excavated evidence to establish a historical perspective, and overlooked other complex factors in ancient human activities. This method, according to the two authors, resulted in high levels of subjectivity and contradicted the common trend among Western researchers, which took the physical discoveries as not necessarily representing real social or political units.