Li Ji (Wade-Giles: Li Chi; July 12, 1896 - August 1, 1979) was a Chinese archeologist. He is considered to be the founder of modern Chinese archeology and his work was instrumental for proving the historicity of the Shang Dynasty.
Li Ji stems from a wealthy family of the Hubei province, where he was born in 1896 in the city of Zhongxiang. In 1918 he left for the United States to study anthropology at the Harvard University. He received his PhD degree in 1923 and worked for a short time at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington. After that he returned to China to teach at the Nankai University. In 1925 and 1926 he did archeological excavations for the Yangshao culture in the southern part of the Shanxi province. In 1928 he became the first director of the archeology department of the Academica Sinica and started to teach at the Tsinghua University as well.
Li Ji led the excavations at Yinxu near Anyang from 1928 to 1937 until the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War prevented further work. These excavations yielded the discovery of a royal palace and over 300 graves including 4 royal ones. The recovered artefacts comprised among others early bronze casts and a large number of oracle bones, which represent the earliest significant corpus of ancient Chinese writing. Those findings finally established the historicity of the Shang Dynasty, which still had been a subject of debate up to this point.
After the war Li Ji fled to Taiwan when the communist under Mao Zedong took power in mainland China. There he became the head of the archeology and anthropology departments of the National Taiwan University in Taipeh. He died on August 1 of 1979 in Taipeh.