by Li Feng
Early Farming Communities
As discussed in Chapter 1, the transition to Neolithic life in China was achieved under much more favorable climatic conditions when the average annual temperature in North China was 3–4 °C higher than the present-day temperature and the lakes on average were some 4.5 m above today’s level. Interestingly in China the three critical inventions that made Neolithic life possible – agriculture, the manufacture of pottery ware, and sedentary life – seem to have taken place in more or less the same period of time, being different from some other regions such as Mesopotamia where agriculture and sedentary life appeared around 10,000 BP, predating pottery-making by some two millennia.
It is now widely accepted that farming began in North China roughly concomitant with the rise of the Cishan–Peiligang culture in eastern Henan and southern Hebei with sites dated mostly between 6500 and 5000 BC.10 Earlier signs of Neolithic culture were found in 1987 at a site in Hebei Province which yielded a few primitive pottery shards mixed with stone tools; the carbon-14 samples derived from the site have been dated to 10,815–9,700 BP, being the earliest of Neolithic culture in North China.11 Possibly even earlier, at Emaokou in northern Shanxi, a stone-tool workshop site was found, dating probably to the transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic period; it yielded regularly shaped stone hoes and sickles, indicating the possibility of agriculture at that time. But scholars have not agreed on how to fit the assemblage into the general chain of evolution before the coming of a firmly established agricultural economy.
The settlements of the Cishan–Peiligang culture are normally small, measuring about 1–2 ha, never exceeding 6 ha, with features such as simple subterranean dwelling structures and storage pits. Pottery types are simple and three-legged bowls and jars are common, fired at a relatively high temperature; surface treatments are rare but may feature loose cord impressions (Fig. 2.2). At the Cishan site in Hebei, 80 of the 120 ash pits yielded remains of grain and the charcoal samples were determined to have been millet. At the Peiligang site in Henan, charcoal samples of millet were also excavated. By now, some twenty sites contemporary with Cishan–Peiligang have been identified in the Yellow River regions from Shaanxi in the west to Shandong in the east, many being considered “fountainheads” of the “regional” cultures that prospered thereafter according to the “multi-region” theory, and many have yielded charcoal grain samples. These findings suggest that the Cishan–Peiligang culture represents a widely existing first stage of cultural development in the Yellow River valley. They also suggest that farming and sedentary life had already become widespread in North China in the seventh to sixth millennia BC and that millet was the staple crop under cultivation by early communities of village-dwellers. A recently reported site is Jiahu in southern Henan, measuring 5.5 ha and belonging to the millet-farming Cishan–Peiligang culture. However, in a chunk of burnt earth, impressions of ten grains of rice were discovered (Fig. 2.2), securely dated to 6500–5500 BC. The discovery revealed an alternative food strategy available to the Cishan–Peiligang communities, but it also raises the question about the region where rice was first domesticated. At the same site, archaeologists also discovered the earliest tortoiseshell most likely used for divination purposes, inscribed with two isolated graphs.
Fig. 2.2 Peiligang and Jiahu: 1, cooking vessel; 2, stone sickle blade; 3, three-legged bowl; 4, stone quern and roller; 5, oracle shell; 6, rice impression on clay.
It had been thought for a long time that rice was domesticated and cultivated first in South China, centering on certain sites located near Hangzhou Bay, dating around 5000 BC (roughly contemporary to the Yangshao culture in the north), and easily predating South Asia, the other center for rice cultivation in the ancient world, by at least 2,000 years. It took at least the same length of time for the rice agriculture that originated in South China to reach the Korean Peninsula in the north and Southeast Asia in the south. However, recent discoveries have pushed the date of rice domestication far back by at least two millennia, pointing to the inland basins along the Yangzi River. In two early Neolithic sites in Hunan Province, carbon-14 dated to 7500–6100 BC, charcoal remains of rice have been found either in pottery bodies, or in a large quantity of as many as 15,000 grains in a section of a moat surrounding what was probably the earliest defense wall in China.12 Further research has even detected a transitional stage from an economy possibly dependent on the gathering of wild rice to an economy based on the production of domesticated rice – at the site of Diaotonghuan in Jiangxi Province, wild rice was gathered in the early period and domesticated rice was found in the later period, thus fixing this epic-making moment in human history at around 10,000 BC.
In recent years, archaeologists have also made efforts to understand the process by which pottery-making technology was invented in China. In the excavation of the cave site at Zengpiyan in Guangxi, archaeologists were able to define a sequence of strata in which early pottery remains were identified. From the period I stratum, dated to 12,000–11,000 BP, were found a few coarsely made and thick shards, fired at a low temperature. From period II, dated to 11,000–10,000 BP (c. 9100–8000 BC) pottery shards were found that were much better made, their surfaces decorated with patterns, and fired at a higher temperature (Fig. 2.3). Although the subsistence pattern of the Zengpiyan society was likely to have been based on fishing and gathering, the findings offer good lessons as to how pottery-making was developed from its infancy, perhaps in a stage even earlier than in North China.
Fig. 2.3 Earliest ceramic shards from southern China.
Yangshao Society: Segmentary Lineages?
We have no true data that would help us understand the community life in the Cishan–Peiligang culture or its contemporaneous cultures in North and South China. This of course may reflect the limit of archaeological fieldwork, but it can also be surmised that although sedentary life was widely established in North China, the size of human communities was still rather small and the period of site occupation was relatively short, interrupted by periods of migration according to certainly seasonal cycles of agricultural activities.
Sites with identifiable Yangshao traits are widely distributed in Shaanxi, Shanxi, and Henan with a core area near the territorial junction of the three provinces. Outside the Yangshao realm, cultures roughly contemporary with it included the Beixin culture in Shandong, the Hemudu culture in the Yangzi Delta in the south, and the Hongshan culture in the northeast. Intensive research has not only identified a number of local types within the larger Yangshao realm, but has also succeeded in isolating three phases of evolution, making a total length of some 2,000 years as the Yangshao Era. Pottery typology became much more complex in the Yangshao period consisting of various types of cooking vessels, storage jars, water bottles, and food-serving bowls (Fig. 2.4). Particularly pottery wares in the latter two categories were often painted with beautiful patterns, although the preference for such patterns changed over time. For instance, the various forms of fish design once favored by the early Yangshao communities gave way to the more abstract, streamlined, and geometric patterns popular among the middle Yangshao people, and by the late period, monochromic fashion returned to favor with the Yangshao people.
Fig. 2.4 Pottery types of the Yangshao culture: 1, large basin; 2, water bottle; 3, amphora; 4, boat-shaped bottle; 5a, water bottle; 5b, storage jar; 6, large basin; 7, wide-mouthed jar; 8, small serving bowl; 9, cooking pot on a stove; 10, large basin.
There have been a number of large-scale excavations carried out on Yangshao sites, but nowhere has a Yangshao village come closer to being completely exposed than at Jiangzhai, located about 20 km to the east of Xi’an at the middle of the Wei River valley in Shaanxi Province.
The site has five periods of occupation covering the entire Yangshao period with the latest phase extending into the next Longshan period. The initial early Yangshao stage occupation is the best preserved stratum of all. It includes a large settlement of some 200,000 m2 surrounded by a complet
e circular moat, outside which are located three contemporaneous cemeteries. The entire village is centered on an open court where remains of two animal pens were excavated indicating the domestication of animals in the Jiangzhai community. Surrounding the central square, five clusters of house remains were excavated, forming the basic structure of the village. Each cluster is composed of a main house, several smaller houses, numerous storage pits, and pottery kilns, and sometimes also burials of infants (Fig. 2.5). Most houses were subterranean with floors lower than ground level on which were found remains of hearths and raised bed surfaces.
Fig. 2.5 The Jiangzhai village.
The Jiangzhai site offers a holistic view of the social organization of a Yangshao village. A widely acknowledged view – based on Marxist theory of social development – claims that Jiangzhai represents typical matrilineal society practicing something like the “Punaluan marriage” described by Louis Henry Morgan (1818–81) for native Americans.13 It is thus said that the five clusters of houses represent five clans, middle houses represent the families, and small houses which also have basic household functions such as a hearth and domestic implements were dwellings of the families’ daughters and their husbands who are members of the neighboring clans. The three cemeteries were the burial grounds of members of three clans living in the village, and the total population of Jiangzhai was estimated at around some 500 people. A similar interpretation was also applied to the Yuanjunmiao cemetery, located in the east part of the Wei River valley, where a total of fifty-one tombs were excavated in the 1950s, dating also to the early Yangshao phase. The cemetery was considered to have belonged to a single tribe, which was composed of two clans each using one of the two sub-cemeteries. And each tomb pit represents the collective burial of a single kin family, reflecting the similar social structure at Jiangzhai. The society of the Yuanjunmiao cemetery was also considered matrilineal, because children buried in the cemetery were all girls.
The argument of the Yangshao being matrilineal society was controversial from the beginning. Anthropologists have shown that matrilineal society was by no means common in human history, and in China, the evidence deduced to support its identification in archaeological records was far from convincing. Today, although the view is still reiterated by some eminent scholars, the majority of Chinese archaeologists no longer see it as indisputable.14 Alternatively, a later analysis suggests that in Jiangzhai the small and medium houses were both individual socioeconomic units, and the large houses were public spaces for the entire village; therefore, there is no evidence for matrilineal control of the small houses by medium-size houses. The analysis shows that the early Yangshao occupation in Jiangzhai can be further divided into three phases and that the same centrifigual layout of the houses was constant in all three. Thus, the Jiangzhai community is considered to have run a close parallel to the “segmentary lineage system” described by Marshall Sahlins.15
Recent archaeology has also shed new light on the social integration beyond the village level during the late Yangshao phase. From the early 1990s, sites in the area called Zhudingyuan in western Henan, the core of the Yangshao culture, have come under intensive archaeological research. The fieldwork has revealed a major concentration of settlements – in an area of roughly 350 km2 as many as thirty-five late Yangshao settlements have been identified. The most important is the Xipo site where a number of extra large houses were discovered, with the largest, F106: 240, measuring 16 × 15 m. Outside the Xipo village, tombs of unusually large size and rich furnishing were excavated. Although we need to wait for future excavations to reveal the overall settlement structure of the site and the region, information available so far has already changed our understanding of the level of social development in the later centuries of the Yangshao era. Concentration of wealth within the community and social integration at the regional level had evidently taken place, and the relationship of economic, if not political, dominance of smaller villages by their stronger neighbors seems to have already occurred. To analyze the new picture of the Yangzhao society will need new theoretical tools, and it has been proposed that the late Yangshao society might have already come to resemble an early form of “chiefdom,”16 thus higher than the “segmentary lineage system” in developmental stage. Certainly, this question is to be decided by future excavation.
The Longshan “Town” Culture
Around 3000 BC, societies in North China entered a new stage of development, the so-called “Longshan millennium” which lasted for over 1,000 years during which black or gray pottery with various impressed or incised patterns was manufactured and widely used. Different from the preceding Yangshao period, the Longshan cultures are currently analyzed under provincial names such as “Shandong Longshan culture” or “Henan Longshan culture,” which are certainly not accurate, but reflect further regional differentiation in the late Neolithic period. Social integration within relatively smaller regional units, a tendency that had already appeared in the late Yangshao period, was intensified, leading to the emergence of settlement networks with clearly definable hierarchies. Located at the hubs of the regional settlement networks are large population centers characterized by a new archaeological feature – the rammed earth wall – which indicates a social system that was significantly more complex than that of the Yangshao village.17 More than ten such fortified Longshan “towns” had been identified in Henan, Shandong, and Shanxi before the end of the twentieth century.18 An early discovered example was the walled site at Pingliangtai in Henan Province, where a square wall enclosed an area of some 34,000 m2 at the center of the site that extends farther beyond the wall enclosure over a slightly raised mound. Access to the central citadel was controlled at two gates, on the south and the north. The area of the walled enclosure at Pingliangtai is comparable to that of the Jiangzhai village. But while the moat at Jiangzhai encircled the entire residential area of the village, at Pingliangtai the wall only protected the core functions of the site, occupied perhaps by the elite group, leaving the ordinary dwelling areas outside it unprotected.19 Or perhaps the wall was intended as demarcation between the two orders of the population of the Pingliangtai society.
So far the largest town of the Longshan period to have been found is at Taosi in Shanxi Province, the outer wall enclosure covering an area of 2,800,000 m2 (Fig. 2.6). In fact, the Taosi site, dated to 2600–2000 BC and belonging to the so-called Shanxi Longshan culture, shows a sequence of constructions over a span of some 500 years. In the early Taosi stage, a smaller wall enclosure was constructed at the northeastern corner of the site, in which were found large rammed palatial foundations indicating elite functions of the site. In the middle Taosi stage, we see a clear extension of elite control over the entire site and the population for which the outer wall was constructed, providing an administrative boundary for the entire Taosi community. When the elite quarter in the inner wall enclosure was still under occupation, large concentrations of commoners’ residential structures such as caves or semi-subterranean dwellings were constructed in the northwestern part of the site between the two walls. A large cemetery containing both elite and commoners’ tombs was excavated in the southern part of the outer wall area. Elite control is also seen in the location of a granary area, possibly protected by another wall enclosure, close to the palatial zone in the inner circle. But most importantly, double layers of wall were constructed in the south, forming a separate enclosure in which is found one of the world’s oldest solar observatories, marking the intellectual center of the Taosi community (Box 2.1).
Fig. 2.6 Taosi town of the Longshan period.
* * *
Box 2.1 The Taosi Solar Observatory
This is one of the most astonishing archaeological discoveries of the new century. Excavated in 2003 and located in the small enclosure attached to the southeastern wall of the Taosi city, this circular building was originally shaped in three steps, and the platform at each level is demarcated by a wall constructed with rammed earth, the outmost wall bein
g located some 25 m from the center of the compound. The innermost or central platform has a radius of 12.25 m and the wall of its circumference continues for about 25 m. An array of eleven solid square pillars was constructed along this thin wall, leaving ten narrow slits between them (later, two more pillars were found at the north end of the line, making a total of thirteen pillars and twelve slits). Since these solid pillars are deeply inserted into the platform, the excavators suggest that they might have served merely as bases to support stone pillars that topped them. The sightlines going through the twelve slits lead back to a single observation spot at the center of the platform (Fig. 2.7).
Fig. 2.7 Solar observatory discovered in the walled town in Taosi, Shanxi, 2003.
Stratigraphic evidence suggests that the building was constructed and used for perhaps a few centuries during the middle period of Taosi before its destruction around 2100 BC. On-site experiments that took place in the years following the discovery leave little doubt that the platform was used for solar observation between the two solstitial extremes in any given year, and it is one of the oldest astronomical observatories in the world confirmed by archaeology. The astronomical historian David W. Pankenier suggests that the structure could be used to determine sections on a horizonal calendar that could have yielded an approximation of the length of the solar year to within a week. Thus, the Taosi astronomers were concerned with correlations between the lunar months and the solar year and this eventually gave rise to a lunar–solar combined calendar with the intercalary thirteenth month inserted in the regular year circles, a system that was definitely in use in China by the thirteenth century BC, proven for the late Shang by oracle-bone studies. More importantly, Pankenier further suggests that the Taosi astronomical observatory provided a context in which a writing system would likely be needed for keeping the calendar starting with signs invented to identify sections of time or celestial bodies.21
