This year marks the 15th anniversary of the naming of "Shangshan Culture", and the "Daoyuan Qiming - Zhejiang Shangshan Culture Archaeology Special Exhibition", which comprehensively displays the archaeological research results of Shangshan culture, is being exhibited at the National Museum of China, and has attracted much attention for several "China's earliest" and "world's first".
Also located in Zhejiang, what is the relationship between Shangshan culture and the well-known Hemudu culture and Liangzhu culture? How did Shangshan culture rewrite the history of Chinese civilization and even the history of world civilization? Here, let me clarify this series of questions for you.
The Shangshan culture advanced the history of civilization in the lower Yangtze River and southern China to 10,000 years ago
Before understanding the Shangshan culture, it is first necessary to clarify two concepts, namely culture and archaeological culture.
The most classic definition of "culture" is the expression of the English anthropologist Edward Taylor in his famous book Primitive Culture in 1871 that "culture, or civilization, in its broad ethnological sense, is a composite of all knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, laws, customs, and any other talents and habits acquired and accepted by people who are members of society."
Archaeology is mainly the science of studying the remains of ancient material culture. Archaeological culture is both a concrete concept that reflects the relics of the earth and an abstract concept that encompasses people. The famous British archaeologist Gordon Childe put it this way in the preface to his book Danube in Prehistoric Times in 1929 that "we find specific types of remains—clay pots, utensils, decorations, funerals, and house forms—that are repeated." This complex correlation characteristic, which we define as a cultural group, can be simply called 'culture'. ”
Simply put, archaeological culture is the sum of the often recurring relics and relics found by archaeologists that belong to the same era, the same region, and the same group of people.
Then, according to this definition, the culture of the mountain can be expressed as follows.
The Shangshan culture was named "Shangshan Culture" because it was first discovered at the Shangshan site in Pujiang County, Zhejiang Province (Note: Discovered in 2000 and officially named in 2006). It is currently the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, but also the earliest Neolithic archaeological culture found in southern China, mainly distributed in the Jinqu Basin in central Zhejiang Province, a total of 20 sites such as Shangshan, Xiaohuangshan, Qiaotou, Lotus Mountain, Xiatang, etc. have been found, and the carbon 14 dating data shows that its age is about 10,000-8500 years old, which can be divided into three periods: early, middle, and late, about 10,000 years, about 9,000 years, and about 8,500 years. It is one of the important sources of Neolithic culture in southern China.
Shangshan culture is novel and unique, rich in connotation and obvious in characteristics. Pottery is mainly large-mouth pots, amphora jars, flat bottom plates, hoop foot pots, and a small number of circular bottom kettles, barrel pots, folded shoulder pots, cups, bowls, bottles and back pots, faience pottery and red jacket charcoal pottery are uniquely representative. Stone tools are represented by millstones, grinding rods, stone balls, perforated stone tools and stone tools.
In the excavated Shangshan cultural sites, there are remains of ring moats, housing sites, ash pits, tombs and artifact pits, showing the settlement structure with obvious planning characteristics and also showing the settlement life pattern that has reached a certain level. Not only that, the researchers also found the flurry of rice husks in the pottery carcass, the florized rice and spikelet shafts were selected from the soil, and the rice phytosilicates were observed under the microscope, and the remains of these different types of rice cultivation showed very obvious domestication characteristics, providing important information for the study of rice origin and agricultural production.
From the perspective of cultural genes, Shangshan culture can be regarded as the matrix of Hemudu culture and Liangzhu culture
As mentioned earlier, the discovery and research of the Shangshan culture has advanced the history of civilization in the lower Reaches of the Yangtze River and southern China to 10,000 years ago, so what is its relationship with the Hemudu culture and Liangzhu culture that we are familiar with?
According to the chronological period of archaeology, the Chinese Neolithic age can be divided into early, middle, late and late periods, dating back to about 12,000-4,000 years. The Shangshan culture belongs to the early and late Neolithic period, the Hemudu culture belongs to the middle Neolithic period, and the Liangzhu culture belongs to the late Neolithic period. Purely from the time level, Hemudu culture is 7000-6000 years old, Liangzhu culture is 5300-4300 years old, and Shangshan culture is much earlier than Hemudu culture and Liangzhu culture.
Some people may ask, the three of them are not completely connected, and there are chronological gaps in the middle. This question is actually very critical because it involves the cultural genealogy of our archaeological research. If you summarize it simply, the cultural genealogy is the temporal and spatial context of the development of archaeological culture, specific to the Shangshan, Hemudu and Liangzhu cultures, which are several important nodes in the cultural sequence of "Shangshan Culture - Cross-Lake Bridge Culture - Hemudu Culture - Songze Culture - Liangzhu Culture", and between them there are also the Cross-Lake Bridge Culture (8000-7000 years ago) and songze culture (5800-5300 years ago), and the Liangzhu culture is followed by the Qianshan Yang culture (4400-4200 years), The Guangfulin culture (4200-4000 years ago), together they built the entire Neolithic archaeological culture chronicle system in the lower Reaches of the Yangtze River from early to late. In this system, the Shangshan culture is the earliest, and its successor, the cross-lake bridge culture, is an important source of the Hemudu culture, and the Hemudu culture has a very important influence on the Liangzhu culture.
Therefore, from the perspective of cultural genes or cultural traditions, the Shangshan culture can be regarded as the matrix of Hemudu culture and Liangzhu culture. Although the three cultures have their own characteristics and differences in the cultural features embodied in pottery and stone tools, from the perspective of the formation of agricultural society, especially the origin, continuation and development of rice farming, the three can be regarded as three progressive stages of development, one wave after another, and the social development path based on rice farming has finally laid the regional civilization evolution model of Shangshan culture from "the earliest village" to the "earliest country" of Liangzhu culture. The above narrative is only a very thick generalization, specific to the real cultural development, which is far more complex than we think.
The "four earliest" rewrite history, of which rice farming is the first in the world and faience pottery appears first in the world
In general, the Shangshan culture has epoch-making significance in rice farming, settlement of agricultural villages, technological innovation of faience pottery, and the production of winemaking technology, which is embodied in the "four earliest".
Rice farming was the first to emerge. Academician Yuan Longping once wrote an inscription for shangshan culture - "Ten thousand years on the mountain, the source of rice in the world", which fully explains the importance of Shangshan culture in the study of the origin of rice farming. Zhao Zhijun, a famous plant archaeologist, believes that rice farming is a human behavior, and our study of the origin of rice cultivation is actually to study why the agricultural practice of human cultivation of rice appeared in time, and thus explore why humans domesticated rice. In this sense, Shangshan culture not only appears the various domestication characteristics of rice crop properties, but also well interprets the certainty of human behavior, which is manifested in all aspects of rice planting, harvesting, processing, and eating, as well as in technical characteristics such as pottery and winemaking. Shangshan culture has emerged a set of relatively systematic "evidence chains of rice farming behavior", which already has the rudiments of rice farming economy, and rice farming has emerged earliest and most clearly.
The earliest carbonized rice
Settlement of villages was the earliest. If according to my personal understanding, the Shangshan culture is in the early and late Neolithic period, and also in the completion stage of the transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic, the study of this period has a special topic in archaeology - "Neolithic Revolution", that is, the study of the origin of agriculture and the emergence of settlement in human history, as well as the production of pottery and grinding stone tools. This is Childe's theory based on archaeological materials from the West Asian region.
In East Asia, the Shangshan culture is the earliest known agricultural society that has appeared in stable village settlements, and is consistent with the emergence and development of rice agriculture and pottery technology in time and process, which is different from the characteristics of settlement in West Asia before agriculture and agriculture before pottery, that is to say, in the process of developing from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic, the Shangshan culture is likely to represent a new agricultural origin and settlement model. In this sense, this is also a manifestation of the uniqueness and innovation of Shangshan culture.
What extends from this question is a hint to us that before the Shangshan culture, there was still a historical stage that we did not yet recognize, and that agriculture and settlement in this stage may be in a state of true origin, and that the Shangshan culture had shown a progressive nature that was clearly beyond that of its contemporaries. Mr. Yan Wenming deserves to be called "the first village in ancient China"!
Remains of the earliest settled villages
Faience technology appeared first. At present, the Shangshan culture faience pottery found is the earliest in the world, which is earlier than the faience pottery that appeared in west Asia after 9,000 years, especially the discovery of the bridgehead site is the most representative.
The faience of the Shangshan culture is closely related to its mature pottery making process, and can be divided into two types: red color and milky white color. The red color is mainly a strip color, decorated in the lip or shoulder neck position of the pot and can, the most typical is the large mouth basin. This type of utensil is coated with red clothes on the outer wall, milky white on the inner wall, and a circle of bright red color is applied to the edge of the mouth. The opalescent ornamentation is more abundant, mainly found on pot-shaped jars, hoop foot plates and bowl-shaped vessels, and the patterns are decorated with sun patterns, short-line combination patterns, folded tooth patterns and dot colors.
The sun pattern is the most explicit faience symbol of the Shangshan culture, which embodies the cultural connotations such as consciousness concepts and spiritual beliefs, and it is found that there is a radiant sun, a sun rising from the horizon, and an abstract sun symbol, which is the earliest sun pattern found in China. The short-line combination pattern is considered to be the earliest number symbol, which is very similar to the later guaxiang system, and its mysterious and cultural connotations are worth exploring in depth.
Shangshan culture of faience pottery also led the faience technology and conceptual thinking in southern China, with the sun pattern, the number of gua symbols as the image, with the figurative, iconographic as the characteristics of the faience tradition has had a profound impact on the subsequent culture of the entire Neolithic era, the direct source of cross-lake bridge culture faience pottery is the Shangshan culture.
The earliest faience pottery
Winemaking technology was first developed. Shangshan Culture has found the earliest evidence of winemaking in China, and in the twenty pottery specimens belonging to the Shangshan Culture excavated at the Qiaotou site, we have analyzed the residues of starch grains, phytosilicas, molds, and yeast cells. The results of the analysis showed that eight specimens of artifacts had been used to store wine (or fermentation). Brewing ingredients include rice, barley and root plants. At the same time, the residue of these utensils contains a large number of mold and yeast cells, some of which match the morphological characteristics of Aspergillus or Rhizobium, and the yeast shape is mostly round and oval, showing a budding state. Phytosilicate residues include rice shells and stems and leaves, as well as other herbaceous plants.
Combining the results of the analysis of various residues, the pottery stored in the qiaotou site may be a primitive wine. The shangshan people use moldy grains and the stem and leaf chaff of herbaceous plants to cultivate beneficial fermentation flora, which is fermented and brewed with rice, barley and root crops. In this way, the ancestors of the Shangshan culture period have mastered the storage technology of grain, and through continuous experimentation, they have obtained a relatively primitive winemaking technology, and the secondary processing and morphological transformation of the surplus grain may mean that the Shangshan culture actively creates wine, and the appearance of wine in the Qiaotou site may be closely related to some of the ritual functions of the site.
From these different aspects, the significance and academic value of the discovery of Shangshan culture are self-evident. It not only represents the earliest Neolithic archaeological culture in southern China, dating back to 10,000 years ago, which is an important beginning of China's 10,000-year cultural history, but also discovers evidence of various types of rice domestication and early rice farming production evidence, which is an important beginning of China's 10,000-year history of rice cultivation and an important origin of rice farming in the world.
The emergence of settled villages and early agricultural societies based on and supported by rice farming and diversified feeding economy in the Shangshan culture was an important beginning in China's 10,000-year history of agricultural settlement. The Shangshan culture discovered the world's earliest faience pottery, which is an important representative of the origin and technological development history of Chinese pottery for 10,000 years. The Shangshan culture also found remnants of fermented winemaking using rice, coix seeds, and tubers as raw materials and pottery vessels, which is the earliest wine discovered in the early Neolithic period in China. The material achievements and technological inventions presented by the Shangshan culture are at the forefront of the same era, as Professor Fu Daokaku of the University of London pointed out: "The Shangshan culture is one of the key turning points in the cultural transformation and human ecological transformation initiated by the 'Neolithic Revolution'. This is the key to the transition to a growing society. ”
From this point on, represented by the shangshan culture, the history of Chinese civilization for ten thousand years has begun a formal start, a great road to civilization is slowly unfolding to us, and the prehistoric Chinese civilization based on the southern rice cultivation civilization and the northern millet cultivation civilization has begun to shine brightly.
Author: Sun Hanlong (Doctor of Archaeology, Librarian of Zhejiang Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology)
Image source: National Museum of China, Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology
Editor: Fan Xin