Born in rural Hunan, he became a refugee following the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, eventually settling in Santai County, Sichuan, where he graduated from middle school.

He briefly enrolled in Peking University as a law student, but switched his study to history due to the rapid legal reforms of the Chinese Communist Party government.

Although able to evade persecution during the increased government scrutiny of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, Zou was subjected to struggle sessions and physical violence from students during the Cultural Revolution.

In 1977, he published Shang Zhou Kaogu, a prominent archaeology textbook based on course material revised over the previous 20 years.

Although pressured into retirement in 1996, he was awarded the American National Museum of Asian Art's Shimada Prize for his work, following the release of the four-volume report Tianma-Qucun 1980–89.

[3] In 1955, he graduated from Peking University, becoming the first person to earn a Doctoral Candidate degree (equivalent to a PhD) in archaeology since the foundation of the People's Republic.

He spent the next year teaching history at Lanzhou University and the Northwest Normal Institute, and was appointed as a lecturer at his alma mater.

Over the following years he supervised undergraduate training excavations at various locations in Hebei, Henan, and Beijing, ranging from the Neolithic period to the Liao dynasty.

[6] From March 1976 to May 1977, Zou wrote an archaeological textbook entitled Shang Zhou Kaogu (Chinese: 商周考古; lit.

Earlier attempts were made to revise the material in 1960 and 1972 (the latter in collaboration with Li Boqian), but these were never put to print for unknown reasons, instead serving as bases for the 1977 edition.

[12] Xia Nai argued that each proposed chronology was problematic in its own right, but that study of Zou's identification of Zhengzhou Shang City with Bo should be pursued further.

[11] From 1979 to 1994, Zou spent much of his time supervising excavations at the Zhou-era Tianma-Qucun site, in collaboration with the Institute of Archaeology of Shanxi Province.

He stayed at Harvard for 8 months, and taught a seminar on Bronze Age China alongside Chang and Chinese University of Hong Kong professor Lin Shoujin.

[16] Zou wrote that his identification of the Xia dynasty with the Erlitou culture was made using the same methods previously employed by Wang Guowei to connect the list of Shang kings in the Shiji, a Han-era history, with those mentioned in the Oracle bone texts.

This view is in contrast to another school of thought (including archaeologists such as Zhang Changshou and Kwang-chih Chang) which place the Shang's origins further east, centered around eastern Henan and the surrounding region.

Although aligning with traditional accounts of their origins, this heavily contrasted with Ch'ien Mu's theory, first proposed in 1931, which placed the Zhou homeland in the Fen River valley of Shanxi.

[8][21] American sinologist Robert Thorp criticized Zou's adherence to Marxist historiography, claiming it "permeates every aspect" of the Shang Zhou Kaogu.

[8] Yale anthropologist David W. Goodrich criticized Thorp's assessment of Zou, arguing that although he was forced to make some concessions to Marxist and Maoist conceptions of Chinese history, his underlying framework was compatible with western historiography and archaeology.