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In Chinese history, there was once a matriarchal society that built a social organization based on the principle of matriarchal succession, which can be proved by a large number of documentary records of the pre-Qin and Han dynasties, and is also affirmed by the domestic academic community.
The problem is that scholars, when discussing matriarchal societies, tend to equate matriarchy with matriarchal power, claiming that in Chinese matriarchal societies, that is, from the late Paleolithic to the middle Neolithic period, women engaged in collecting and primitive agriculture, were the main labor force in agricultural production, played a decisive or dominant role in social and economic life, and thus women's social status was higher than that of men, and women not only enjoyed special respect in society, but also controlled the right to manage clan affairs and economic life. In short, the ancient Chinese matriarchal society was a "matriarchal society" characterized by a matriarchal system in which women ruled over men.
Was there really an "era of matriarchy" in China's history?
As we all know, the idea of the matriarchy era was first proposed by historians such as Guo Moruo in the 1930s and repeatedly argued by scholars in the 1950s and 1960s. Due to the limitations of historical conditions, these scholars can rely on not many documents and ethnographic materials in the process of studying China's primitive society, and the prehistoric archaeological data is very limited.
Therefore, scholars at that time mainly reconstructed the prehistoric era of Chinese history according to Morgan's primitive social history model. Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, the tremendous progress made in scientific archaeological excavations has made us deeper and deeper understand of China's prehistoric culture and society.
It now seems that the system of primitive social history in China constructed by the previous scholars based on morgan's model does not conform to the reality of history.
The results of a comprehensive investigation of a large number of neolithic cultural archaeological data and historical documents show that although there was a matriarchal society in ancient China, there was no "matriarchy", and scholars believe that there was a matriarchal system in ancient China, and the main basis for scholars to believe that in the matriarchal society, women were the main labor force in primitive agricultural production, bearing heavy production labor and playing a decisive role in the economy, which was the material basis for the prevalence of "matriarchy".
Judging from the large number of archaeological data seen now, the matriarchists' description of the original farming and agricultural production in the Neolithic period in China is actually incorrect.
According to incomplete statistics, more than 7,000 Neolithic cultural sites have been discovered in the country, and after scientific excavations, a series of early Neolithic cultures have been discovered in the Yellow River Yangtze River Basin so far, including the Pei Ligang culture in Henan, the Magnetic Mountain culture in Hebei, the Dadiwan culture in Gansu, the Majiabang culture in Jiangsu and the Hemudu culture in Zhejiang.
Most of these pre-Neolithic cultures were in the transition from a feeding economy to a food-producing economy, using pottery and operating primitive hoe farming.
Settlements have become quite stable, precisely in the matriarchal boom in which Morgan called women's leading role in the agrarian economy.
However, the excavation reports of the above cultural sites tell us that the main labor force in agricultural production in the Peiligang, Majiabang, Magnetic Mountain, Dadiwan and Hemudu cultural eras was actually men rather than women.
This can be confirmed by the combination of burial items in the tombs of each site.
For example, in the Peiligang Cultural Cemetery more than 7500 years ago, after human bone identification, all male tombs were buried with stone shovels, stone axes and stone sickles, while female tombs were buried with stone grinding discs, grinding rods and clay pots.
As the history of the development of China's agricultural production tools shows,
Stone shovels, stone axes, and stone sickles were the main tools of production in Neolithic agricultural production and were used in several major production links from reclamation to harvest: stone axes were used to cut down trees before burning, stone shovels were used to plough the ground, and stone sickles were used for harvesting.
The male owner of the Peilinggang Cultural Cemetery used stone axes, stone shovels and stone sickles as burial items, indicating that the men who mastered these tools before they were the main labor force in agricultural production at that time; and the stone grinding plates, grinding rods and clay pots and clay spoons that were mastered by women before they were born, of which clay pots and clay spoons were cooking utensils, and stone grinding plates and grinding rods were grain threshing tools, which showed that women at that time were mainly engaged in household work such as grain processing, cooking food and raising children.
The Majiabang culture, which dates back about 7,000 years in the lower Reaches of the Yangtze River, also shows the same division of gender as the early Neolithic culture of the Yellow River.
For example, the Changzhou Weidun site has cleared out 83 Majiabang culture tombs, most of which can determine their gender after identification.
The results show that the tomb owners and male tombs with burial items are mostly buried with agricultural production tools such as stone hammers, perforated stone axes, stone chisels, staghorns and fishing and hunting tools such as bone hammers, while female tombs are mostly buried with cooking utensils such as pottery, beans, pots, bowls and textile tools such as pottery spinning wheels.
A series of Neolithic cultural sites discovered so far, mortal skeletons are well preserved and gender-identified, and the combination of their burial items shows that:
The main laborers in china's early Neolithic primitive hoe farming were men rather than women, and men undertook most of the labor in agricultural production from reclamation to harvesting, and played a decisive role in social and economic life. The theory of "matriarchy", which holds that women play a leading role in the productive economy and thus dominate men politically, is clearly untenable.
In some previous treatises, scholars who hold the theory of matriarchy often take the Yangshao culture as an example, believing that there is a so-called "thick burial of women" burial custom in the early Neolithic cultural sites in China, claiming that this phenomenon epitomizes the matriarchal social characteristics of "female-centered" and "women occupy a dominant position in society".
Was there a common custom of "thick burial for women" in the early Neolithic culture?
A thorough examination of the archaeological data from a series of pre-Neolithic sites discovered to date reveals:
This is not the case in history, and the so-called implementation of thick burials for women in china's early Neolithic culture is actually inaccurate.
In the early Neolithic sites, there are cases where the burial items of individual female or male tombs are more than other tombs at the same site. Scholars of the matriarchy doctrine have proved it. It is often based on the female base with more burial items, but avoids the fact that there are also some male tombs with more burial items in the same place.
For example, some scholars have given examples of women's tombs buried with hundreds of bone beads and other burial items in the Base of the Yuanjun Temple of Yangshao Culture, arguing that the status of women in society at that time was higher than that of men, so Yangshao Cultural Society was a matriarchal society.
This generalized approach is clearly inadequate.
In fact, there is both a phenomenon of "thick burial" for individual women and a "thick burial" for individual men in the Yangshao culture Yuanjun Temple cemetery.
As shown in the excavation report of the Yuanjunmiao Cemetery, the owner of the No. 12 cemetery with the most burials in the cemetery is a man; in addition, Tomb No. 458 in the cemetery has a two-story platform at the bottom of the tomb, on which several layers of gravel are piled up to form a sarcophagus, and seven pieces of pottery are buried, which is the most elaborate tomb in the Weshao culture cemetery, and the owner of the tomb is not a woman but an elderly man.
In the early Neolithic site of Jiahu Lake in Henan Province, which dates back 7000 to 8,000 years before the Yangshao culture, it is also a male thick burial and a female thick burial in the same cemetery.
If there are more burials of individual women in a certain site, it can be used as a sign of the high status of women in a certain culture, and what is the explanation for the phenomenon that there are more burials of individual men in the same culture or in the same site?
After death, such figures are buried with the practical utensils they used during their lifetime.
Therefore, if a person (whether male or female) has a few more pieces of pottery ornaments or production tools in his tomb, it can only mean that the deceased had more daily objects during his lifetime, but it cannot prove how generous he or she was treated at the funeral, let alone to prove the difference in social status or identity between men and women.
It should be pointed out that the so-called view that there was a patriarchal society in ancient China was copied and imposed in Chinese history by scholars in the 1930s from the anthropologists of the Western classical evolutionist school in the 19th century.
For more than 100 years, the scientific investigations and studies conducted by anthropologists around the world on the surviving primitive societies on the earth have proved that what Bajofen, Morgan and others call "matriarchy", that is, female domination in the true sense, has never been found in any society and culture to date.
From the comprehensive investigation of historical documents, ethnographic materials and archaeological excavation reports, the primitive social history of Chinese civilization not only does not provide any evidence for the so-called matriarchy theory to be established.
On the contrary, it proves that the matriarchal society that has always been regarded by scholars as the supremacy of matriarchy is actually a society in which men occupy a dominant, dominant, or dominant position in the political, economic, military, religious and other fields of society.
In the literature, the heroes of the late Chinese and ancient times, such as the Yellow Emperor, the Yan Emperor, the Taihao, the Fuxi, the Xuan you, the Shaohao, the Shaohao, the Emperor, the Emperor, the Emperor, the Emperor, the Emperor, the Emperor, the Zhu Rong, the Dragon, the Yu, and so on, are almost all male.
Some famous women in the matriarchal society recorded in the history books, such as The female ancestor of the Yin people, Jian Di, the female ancestor of the Zhou people, Jiang Yuan, the female ancestor of the Qin people, and so on, did not have the status and power in the society at that time to rule men from above, but mainly to have children, spin cloth and weave, and engage in some auxiliary affairs.
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