Source: Guangming Daily
The faience pot with fish pattern on the face of the human face was excavated in 1955 at the Banpo site in Xi'an and is now in the National Museum of China. Courtesy of Visual China
On October 17, yangshao village national archaeological site park located in Shichi County, Sanmenxia City, Henan Province, was officially opened. Courtesy of Visual China
On October 15, the Faience Double Pot exhibited by the Henan Museum was excavated in Dahe Village, Zhengzhou City, Henan Province in 1972. Courtesy of Visual China
2021 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of modern Chinese archaeology, and the starting point of century-old archaeology is a major discovery of the Yangshao culture, which is 7000-4700 years old and lasts 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.
The Chinese discovery of the Swedes
When it comes to Yangshao culture, the Swede Anderson is an unavoidable name. Born in Kingsta, Sweden in 1874, Anderson received his Ph.D. in geology from uppsala University in Sweden in 1901 and made two geological expeditions to Antarctica.
In 1910, the International Geological Society held its eleventh congress in Stockholm, Sweden, and Anderson was designated secretary general of the conference. At that time, the conference secretariat organized a global mineral resources survey, and Based on the results of the survey, Anderson edited and published the survey collections of "World Mineral Resources" and "World Coal Mine Resources", which attracted the attention of the Beiyang Government of China. In May 1914, Anderson was invited to China to serve as a consultant to the Mining Department of the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, helping China to discover iron ore, coal and other mineral deposits in Hebei, Henan, Shanxi and other places.
In the process of investigating mineral resources, Anderson gradually became interested in paleontological fossils, and together with other paleontological experts, they discovered the Zhoukoudian Peking Man site. In 1920, Anderson sent his assistant Liu Changshan to Henan to investigate paleontological fossils, and Liu Changshan collected and purchased more than 600 stone tool specimens in Yangshao Village, Shichi County, Sanmenxia City, and brought them back to Beijing. After reading the specimens, Anderson predicted that there might be Stone Age sites near Yangshao Village, so in April 1921, together with Liu Changshan, he visited Yangshao again and found some polished pottery fragments and stone tools such as stone tools.
In October 1921, Anderson and Yuan Fuli of the Central Geological Survey institute and others began formal excavations in Yangshao Village, excavating a total of 17 sites and 10 tombs, and found that the site area was about 240,000 square meters, the average thickness of the cultural layer reached 3 meters, and a large number of stone tools, pottery and bone tools were excavated.
Based on the excavated cultural relics, Anderson judged that this area is a remnant of ancient Chinese culture and named it Yangshao culture according to international archaeological practices. In 1923, Anderson published "Ancient Chinese Culture", which published the archaeological excavations and research results of Yangshao culture to the world.
The excavation of Yangshao culture is the first organized and planned scientific archaeological excavation in China, marking the establishment of modern Chinese archaeology and filling the gap in the history of China's ancient cultural development, especially the Stone Age. Compared with the cultural sites found 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, and the distribution range is even wider, radiating to the entire middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River.
However, although Anderson made great achievements in the discovery of Yangshao cultural sites and overturned the "thesis" of the Western archaeological community on the Chinese Stone Age, he was not from an archaeology class after all, did not have special archaeological academic training, failed to adopt the analysis methods of archaeological typology and stratigraphy in the excavation process, and was subject to the era background of the prevalence of Eurocentrism at that time, which led to serious mistakes in judging the origin of Yangshao culture.
"Yangshao culture in the west"
Yangshao culture is an important feature of faience pottery, before the official excavation of the site of Yangshao Village, Anderson, while looking for archaeological data on faience pottery, noticed the report of the American archaeologist Pompeii, who excavated the Anno site near Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan in Central Asia, in 1904.
Anderson found that the faience pottery excavated from the Anno site is very similar to the pattern of the faience pottery he found in Yangshao Village, so there is a hypothesis that Yangshao culture spread from Central Asia, "Compared with the artifacts of Henan and Anno, the similarities in their graphics are many and relevant, which makes us unable to afford the same source of feelings", but he was unable to open up the geographical chain relationship between the Yangshao site and the Anno site in cultural dissemination.
In order to test his hypothesis, from 1923 onwards, Anderson began to go to Gansu, Qinghai and other places to investigate. He found that the faience pottery unearthed in Gansu and Qinghai regions was more advanced than the technology of faience pottery unearthed in Yangshao, but it was rare to see pottery bristles, pottery dings and other artifacts representing the Central Plains culture, and at that time, There was no faience pottery unearthed earlier than Yangshao faience in China, and there were many prehistoric faience excavations in Europe and Central Asia.
Anderson deduced a cultural transmission route: the early human civilization represented by the production of faience pottery first spread from West Asia and Central Asia to Xinjiang, Qinghai, Gansu, and then gradually spread to Yangshao and other Central Plains regions, combined with the existing mane and Ding production technology in the Central Plains, and finally developed the Yangshao culture of both pottery, pottery and faience pottery.
Based on this, Anderson completed the theoretical inference and "physical verification" of "Yangshao culture in the West", and then publicly published his views, which had great repercussions in the world.
Since the Yangshao site is the earliest cultural relic found in China at that time, the view of "Yangshao culture in the west" will lead to the conclusion that "Chinese culture came from the west" when it is further extended. Therefore, arguing that Yangshao culture is original to China and clarifying its development and rheological process has become an important task for archaeologists, and it is also an important internal driving force for the in-depth advancement of modern Chinese archaeology.
The Quest of Chinese Scholars
In 1930, Liang Qichao's second son, Liang Siyong, returned to China from Harvard University in the United States majoring in archaeology and anthropology, sorted out the fragments of pottery from the Yangshao culture period excavated from Xiyin Village, Xia County, Shanxi, and tried to analyze the evolution process of pottery modeling with typological methods according to the changes in the morphology of different parts of the pottery, and then revealed the transmission path of Yangshao culture, but suffered from the inability to restore complete pottery from broken pottery pieces, and had no choice but to give up.
In 1931, Liang Siyong presided over the excavation of the Hougang site in Anyang, Henan, no longer using Anderson's geological method of distinguishing strata according to the depth of detection, but using the archaeological method of distinguishing strata by soil color, and found that the Hougang site contained three cultural layers of Yinshang culture, Yangshao culture, and Longshan culture (4500-4000 years ago), with a clear stratigraphic superposition and succession relationship between each other.
In 1937, Yin Da (formerly known as Liu Yi), a modern archaeologist trained by China himself, found that the yangshao village site actually contained two cultural types, Yangshao and Longshan, which negated Anderson's view that there was only one type of Yangshao culture in Yangshao village, and shook the cornerstone of Anderson's theory.
More importantly, in 1944-1945, Xia Nai, one of the important founders of modern Chinese archaeology, excavated the Qijiaping site in Gansu Province discovered by Anderson that year, and found that the Qijia culture represented by the Qijiaping site (around 4000-3900 years ago) was later than the Stratigraphic evidence of the Yangshao culture, which completely overturned Anderson's view that the prehistoric culture of Qinghai in Gansu was earlier than the Yangshao culture in the Central Plains and was a transit station for the Yangshao culture from Central Asia.
After the founding of New China, Xia Nai became the main guide and organizer of the archaeological work in New China. From 1954 to 1957, Shi Xingbang, a student of Xia Nai, presided over the excavation of the Banpo site on the east bank of the Xun River in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, distinguishing the Banpo culture (around 6800-6300 years ago) belonging to the early type of Yangshao culture, suggesting that the source of Yangshao culture may be in the Weihe River Basin of Shaanxi Province.
In 1958, farmers in Xixiang County, Hanzhong City, Shaanxi Province, discovered stone pottery artifacts while ploughing deep into the land, which were identified as prehistoric cultural relics. Archaeologists then followed up excavations in 1960 and 1961, and found a large number of ancient stone tools and faience pottery in Lijia Village, and later found prehistoric artifacts such as faience bowls and stone axes in Xiameng Village, Xianyang City, Shaanxi Province.
Because the lijiacun and xiamengcun site types 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 site of Lijia village and the site of Xiameng Village predate the Yangshao site, which is based on the unique artifacts such as circle foot bowls and straight barrel three-legged artifacts excavated from the Lijia village site, which are also found in the early sites of Yangshao culture in Baoji North Shouling and Huaxian Yuanjun Temple, and have a relationship of succession in shape. Xia Nai wrote a special article for this purpose, pointing out that "the culture of Lijia Village is a more reliable clue to explore the predecessor of Yangshao culture."
In 1973, the archaeological community released carbon-14 dating data for the first specimens of the Lijiacun site, showing that the site was dated later than the Yangshao culture. But Xia Nai still insisted on his point of view, thinking that the test specimens might be wrong. Later, it was found that the front-line personnel actually mislabeled the strata layer when collecting and testing specimens. After re-testing, it was determined that the cultural age of Lijiacun was more than 7,000 years ago, earlier than the Yangshao culture, and archaeologists finally found cultural relics earlier than the Yangshao culture in the land of China.
Subsequently, archaeologists have successively found the cultural remains of Pei Ligang in Xinzheng City, Henan Province, and Cishan Mountain in Wu'an City, Hebei Province, and the remains of Laoguantai culture in Laoguantai in Hua County, Shaanxi Province, and Dadiwan, Qin'an County, Gansu Province, all dating back to more than 8,000 years ago, far earlier than the Yangshao cultural remains. Among them, the relationship between the old Guantai culture and the Yangshao culture is the closest, which has become the direct source of Yangshao culture. In particular, the faience pottery of the old Guantai culture has not only become an indiscriminate use of Yangshao cultural faience pottery, but also shaped the color style of chinese faience pottery culture in later generations with red as the main color.
Generations of archaeologists have unremittingly explored the origin of Yangshao culture, confirming the original character and local character of China's prehistoric culture. The Yangshao culture, which integrates the cultures of Pei Ligang, Cishan and Laoguantai, with western Henan, southern Shanxi and eastern Shaanxi as the center, branches and leaves on the ancient land of China, carries forward and expands, radiates to the vast areas from eastern Henan in the east, to Gansu and Qinghai in the west, to the Jianghan area of Hubei in the south, to the Great Wall and Inner Mongolia in the north, and evolves into the most widely distributed prehistoric culture in China, forming the initial Integrated Chinese cultural circle, and becoming the archaeological empirical basis for clarifying the origin of Chinese national civilization.
(The author is a Ph.D. in History, Chinese Min University)