The following is a direct quote from K. C. Chang's The Archaeology of Ancient China, p. 308-309:

"Despite the mythological tint of many of the textual stories concerning some of the Hsia (Xia) kings, especially the dynasty's founder, Yu, the textual record of the Hsia is regarded by Chinese historians as basically believable primarily because of the of the many historiographic and folkloric traditons concerning the towns and cities that served as the political centers and cells of the Hsia. Historical geography has been a particularly important component of traditional Chinese historiography, and the oral and literary traditions concerning individual towns often persisted for centuries or even millennia and must be taken seriously - this is an article of faith for any scholar who has made profitable use of such classic historio-geographic encyclopedias as Shui Ching Chu (ca. A.D. 500) and T'ai-p'ing Huan-yu Chi (ca. A.D. 1000), the many local gazeteers, and such contemporary classics as Ch'en P'an's Ch'un Ch'iu ta-shih-piao kuo chueh hsing ts'un-mie piao chuan-yi (1969).

"Thus, in 1959, when Hsu Hsu-sheng of the Institute of Archaeology and his team members set out to look for Hsia-hsu, the Ruins of Hsia, they headed toward the geographical area of the largest concentration of traditional Hsia dynasty towns."

"The Hsu Hsu-sheng party spent more than a month in the central Honan region. Among the sites they visited was Erh-li-t'ou , first discovered in 1957, . . . . As a rsult of Hsu Hsu-sheng's special attention, Erh-li-t'ou became a focus of archaeological excavations by the Institute of Archaeology."

Erh-li-t'ou excavation site is now believed to be a late capital of the Hsia dynasty, and is popularly known as the Ruins of Hsia. In Hsu Hsu-sheng's words (quoted in K. C. Chang, ibid.)

"If we are to look for the area of the activities of the Hsia clan or tribe, we must look among the traditions left from antiquity. . . . Because the Hsia dynasty is so remote from us now, the historical data are not that rich, especially data concerning place names. By a rough estimate, there are about eighty references to Hsia Dynasty and its place names in the texts before the Ch'in dynasty . . . . Of these, fewer than thirty references can be found to Hsia town names. . . . On the basis of a study of their names, we believe that two regions in particular are worthy of special note. The first is the Lo-yang plain and the environs of central Honan, especially the districts of Teng-feng and Yu-hsien in the upper course of the Ying-shui River. The second is the lower Fen-ho River valley in southwestern Shansi approximately south of the Huo-shan Mountains."