A Century of Chinese Archaeologists: Where did the Yangshao Culture come from
2021 is the 100th anniversary of the birth of modern Chinese archaeology, and the starting point of a century of archaeology is a major discovery of the Yangshao culture that lasted from 7000 to 4700 years and lasted for 2300 years.
It was in Yangshao Village that archaeologists revealed the humanistic light of prehistoric China and opened the door to the roots of Chinese culture.
Discovery of China by the Swedes
When it comes to Yangshao culture, the Swede Anderson is an inescapable name.
Anderson was born in Kinsta, Sweden in 1874. He obtained a doctorate degree in geology from Uppsala University in Sweden in 1901, and went to Antarctica for two geological expeditions.
On October 17, the reporter visited Miaodigou Yangshao Cultural Museum in Sanmenxia City.
The picture shows the pottery on display.
Photo by Kan Li, China News Agency reporter
In 1910, the International Geological Society held its eleventh conference in Stockholm, Sweden, and Anderson was appointed as the secretary-general of the conference.
At that time, the secretariat of the conference organized a global survey of mineral resources. Based on the results of the survey, Anderson edited and published the survey collections of "World Mineral Resources" and "World Coal Resources", which attracted the attention of the Chinese Beiyang Government.
In May 1914, Anderson was invited to China to serve as a consultant to the Department of Mines of the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, helping China discover iron ore and coal mines in Hebei, Henan, Shanxi and other places.
In the process of investigating mineral resources, Anderson gradually became interested in paleontological fossils, and jointly discovered the Zhoukoudian Peking Man site with other paleontological experts.
In 1920, Antsen sent his assistant Liu Changshan to Henan to investigate paleontological fossils. Liu Changshan collected and purchased more than 600 stone tool specimens in Yangshao Village, Mianchi County, Sanmenxia City, and brought them back to Beijing.
After looking at the specimens, Anderson predicted that there might be Stone Age sites near Yangshao Village. So in April 1921, he went to Yangshao with Liu Changshan and found some polished painted pottery fragments and stone tools such as adze.
On October 17, the reporter visited Miaodigou Yangshao Cultural Museum in Sanmenxia City.
The picture shows the clay pot on display.
Photo by Kan Li, China News Agency reporter
In October 1921, Anderson and Yuan Fuli of the Central Institute of Geological Survey and others began the formal excavation in Yangshao Village. A total of 17 sites and 10 tombs were excavated. The site area was about 240,000 square meters and the average thickness of the cultural layer was found. Up to 3 meters, a large number of stone tools, pottery, and bones were unearthed.
Based on the unearthed cultural relics, An Tesheng judged that this place is the remains of ancient Chinese culture and named it Yangshao Culture in accordance with international archaeological conventions.
In 1923, Anderson published "The Ancient Chinese Culture", announcing the archaeological excavations and research results of the Yangshao Culture to the world.
The excavation of Yangshao Culture was the first organized and planned scientific archaeological excavation in China. It marked the establishment of modern Chinese archaeology and filled a gap in the development history of ancient Chinese culture, especially the Stone Age.
Compared with the cultural sites discovered in the same period in the world at that time, the Yangshao Culture is second to none in terms of the scale of the site and the thickness of the accumulation of cultural layers.
However, although An Tesheng made a pioneering contribution to the discovery of the Yangshao cultural site and overturned the Western archaeological community’s “thesis” about China’s stone-free age, he was not from an archaeology class after all, and he had not received specialized archaeological academic training. In the process of excavation, he failed to use the analysis methods of archaeological typology and stratigraphy, and was restricted by the era background when Eurocentrism prevailed, which caused him to make serious mistakes in judging the origin of Yangshao culture.
"Yangshao Culture from the West"
The Yangshao Culture is an important feature of painted pottery. Before the official excavation of the Yangshao Village site, An Tesheng noticed that the American archaeologist Pompeii discovered in 1904 near Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, Central Asia. A report on the Ruins of Nuo.
Anderson discovered that the colored pottery unearthed at the Annuo site was very similar to the pattern style of the colored pottery he found in Yangshao Village, so he hypothesized that the Yangshao culture spread from Central Asia. The similarities of the graphics are many and close, which makes us unable to feel the same origin." However, he was unable to get through the geographical chain relationship between the Yangshao site and the Annuo site in cultural communication for a while.
On October 17, Yangshao Village National Archaeological Site Park in Mianchi County, Sanmenxia City, Henan Province officially opened.
The picture shows the pottery exhibited in the Yangshao Cultural Museum.
Photo by Kan Li, China News Agency reporter
In order to verify his hypothesis, from 1923, An Tesheng began to conduct investigations in Gansu, Qinghai and other places.
He discovered that the colored pottery unearthed in Gansu and Qinghai is more advanced than the colored pottery unearthed in Yangshao, but there are few pottery and pottery pottery that represent the Central Plains culture, and there was no colored pottery earlier than the colored pottery in Yangshao at that time. Unearthed, and there are many prehistoric colored pottery excavations in Europe and Central Asia.
From this, Anderson deduced a cultural transmission route: Early human civilization represented by painted pottery was first spread from West Asia and Central Asia to Xinjiang, Qinghai, and Gansu, and then gradually spread to Yangshao and other Central Plains regions. The combination of some Li and Ding production techniques resulted in the development of Yangshao culture with both pottery Li, Ding and painted pottery.
Based on this, An Tesheng completed the theoretical inference and "physical verification" of "Yangshao Culture from the West", and then publicly published his views, which generated great repercussions in the world.
Since the Yangshao site was the earliest cultural relic discovered in China at that time, further extension of the view of "Yangshao Culture from the West" will lead to the conclusion that "Chinese culture comes from the west".
Therefore, it is an important task for archaeologists to demonstrate that Yangshao Culture is a native Chinese original and to understand its development and evolution process, and it is also an important internal drive for the in-depth advancement of modern Chinese archaeology.
The pursuit of Chinese scholars
In 1930, Liang Qichao’s second son, Liang Siyong, returned to China with a degree in archaeology and anthropology from Harvard University. He sorted out the Yangshao period pottery fragments unearthed in Xiyin Village, Xia County, Shanxi. The method used to analyze the evolution process of pottery modeling, and then reveal the propagation path of Yangshao culture, but suffering from the inability to restore the complete pottery from the broken pottery, he had no choice but to give up.
In 1931, Liang Siyong presided over the excavation of the Hougang site in Anyang, Henan. Instead of using Anderson's geological method of distinguishing the strata according to the depth of detection, he adopted the archaeological method of distinguishing the strata by earth color, and found that the Hougang site contained the Yin and Shang culture. The three cultural layers, Yangshao Culture, and Longshan Culture (4,500-4,000 years ago), have a clear layering and succession relationship with each other.
On October 17, the reporter visited Miaodigou Yangshao Cultural Museum in Sanmenxia City.
The picture shows visitors taking photos of the pottery on display.
Photo by Kan Li, China News Agency reporter
In 1937, Yin Da (formerly known as Liu Yao), a modern archaeological expert trained by China, conducted a classification study and found that the Yangshao Village site actually contained two cultural types, Yangshao and Longshan, and denied Andersen’s claim that Yangshao Village had only one type of Yangshao culture. The view shakes the cornerstone of Anderson's theory.
More important discoveries In 1944-1945, Xia Nai, one of the important founders of modern Chinese archaeology, discovered the Qijiaping site represented by the Qijiaping site during the excavation of the Qijiaping site in Gansu that Anderson discovered that year. The stratigraphic evidence that culture (about 4000-3900 years ago) was later than the Yangshao culture completely overturned Andersen's view that the prehistoric culture of Gansu and Qinghai was earlier than the Yangshao culture of the Central Plains and was a transit point for the Yangshao culture from Central Asia to the West.
After the founding of New China, Xia Nai became the main guide and organizer of archaeological work in New China.
From 1954 to 1957, Xia Nai’s student Shi Xingbang presided over the excavation of the Banpo site on the east bank of the Chan River in Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, and distinguished the Banpo culture belonging to the early type of Yangshao culture (about 6800-6300 years ago), suggesting the Yangshao culture The source may be in the Weihe River Basin of Shaanxi.
In 1958, a peasant in Xixiang County, Hanzhong City, Shaanxi Province discovered stone pottery artifacts when they deepened the land, which were identified as prehistoric artifacts.
Archaeologists immediately followed up excavations in 1960 and 1961, and found a large number of ancient stone tools and painted pottery in Lijia Village, and later found painted pottery bowls, stone axes and other prehistoric artifacts in Xiameng Village, Xianyang City, Shaanxi Province.
Because the types of the Lijia Village site and the Xiameng Village site are similar to the Longshan Culture in some respects, most archaeologists believe that these two sites are later than the Yangshao site and are a follow-up development of the Yangshao culture.
Only Xia Nai believes that the Lijia Village site and the Xiameng Village site are earlier than the Yangshao site, based on unique artifacts such as ring-footed bowls and straight tripods unearthed from the Lijia Village site. It is also found in the early cultural sites, and there is a inherited relationship in the shape.
Xia Nai wrote an article specifically for this, and pointed out that "Lijiacun Culture is a relatively reliable clue to explore the predecessor of Yangshao Culture."
In 1973, the archaeological community released the carbon-14 dating data of the first batch of specimens from the Lijiacun site, showing that the site was dated later than the Yangshao culture.
However, Xia Nai still insisted on his own point of view, believing that the test specimens may be wrong.
Sure enough, it was later discovered that the front-line personnel actually marked the stratum in the wrong position when collecting and testing specimens.
After re-testing, it was determined that the cultural age of Lijiacun was more than 7,000 years ago, which was earlier than the Yangshao culture. Archaeologists finally found cultural relics earlier than the Yangshao culture in the land of China.
Later, archaeologists discovered Peiligang·Cishan cultural remains in Peiligang Village, Xinzheng City, Henan Province, Cishan City, Wu'an City, Hebei Province, and Laoguantai Cultural Relics in Huaxian County, Shaanxi Province, and Dadiwan County, Gansu Province. It is concluded that they are more than 8,000 years ago, which is far earlier than the remains of Yangshao culture.
Among them, the relationship between Laoguantai culture and Yangshao culture has recently become the direct source of Yangshao culture.
In particular, the painted pottery of the Laoguantai culture has not only become the origin of the colored pottery of the Yangshao culture, but also shaped the red-dominated hue style of the later Chinese painted pottery culture.
The unremitting exploration of the origin of Yangshao culture by generations of archaeologists has confirmed the original character and local character of Chinese prehistoric culture.
The Yangshao culture, which integrates the cultures of Peiligang, Cishan, and Laoguantai, is centered on western Henan, southwestern Shanxi, and eastern Shaanxi. The vast area extending from the Jianghan area in Hubei in the south to the Hetao of the Great Wall in the north and Inner Mongolia evolved into the prehistoric culture with the most extensive geographical distribution in China, forming the original Chinese integrated cultural circle, which became the archeological evidence for clarifying the origin of the Chinese civilization.
(The author is a Doctor of History, Renmin University of China)
Wu Peng Source: China Youth Daily