Xu Zhijie
There are theories in the archaeological community that Wu Jinding discovered the ruins of Chengziya and was also the discoverer of the Longshan culture, but naming and even further explaining the importance of the Longshan culture and its cultural function should be attributed to Liang Siyong's contribution.
Wu Jinding discovered the ruins of ChengziYa
Liang Siyong briefly described the origin of the name "Longshan culture" in the article "Longshan Culture: One of the Prehistoric Periods of Chinese Civilization", saying, "The evidence for the existence of Longshan culture was first discovered and proposed by Wu Jinding in the spring of 1928. On the western cliff of the local mesa called Chengzi Cliff, a complete cultural layer is exposed. Here the discoverer excavated pieces of pottery with thin tires and black luster that coexisted with stone bone tools. Chengzi Cliff, which is partially piled up by this cultural relic, is on the east bank of a small river 75 miles east of Licheng County, Shandong Province, facing the small town of Longshan. Therefore, the name Yongsan is the name of the culture discovered." The name "Longshan culture" comes from this.
In 1935, Liang Siyong published the article "Xiaotun, Longshan and Yangshao", which conducted a thorough, scientific and historically logical inference on the relationship between the cultural forms of the three different regions. He believes that the earliest era of Longshan culture is earlier than the era of painted pottery culture in the Yangshao period, and the Longshan culture and the Xiaotun culture of the Yin Ruins site are not connected, but the Xiaotun culture of the Yin Ruins site is inherited from the Longshan culture, while the rest of the culture is in the lower reaches of the Yellow River than longshan culture. Liang Siyong's theses on the Longshan culture had a great influence at that time and are still respected by the archaeological community.
Liang Siyong presided over a group photo of the second excavation of Chengzi Cliff, the first on the left is Liang Siyong, taken in October 1931.
Leung Si Yong was born on October 7, 1904 in Macau, China, the second son of Mr. Leung Kai Chiu. In 1923, he graduated from the Preparatory Class of Tsinghua School to study in the United States, and planned to study in the United States that year, but on May 7, he and his eldest brother Liang Sicheng were injured by a car in Beijing, delayed their trip, and took a cruise ship to the United States in the second year after recovering from their injuries, and later entered the Harvard University Research Institute to study archaeology and anthropology. During his stay in the United States, he participated in the excavation of ancient sites of American Indians, and his father, Liang Qichao, proudly declared that his son was "China's first specialized archaeologist", which is not false.
In 1927, at the request of his father, Liang Siyong briefly returned to China to follow Mr. Li Ji, an archaeologist and known as the "father of Chinese archaeology", to excavate in Xiyin Village, Xia County, Shanxi Province, and was invited to serve as a teaching assistant at the Research Institute of Tsinghua University, and returned to the United States the following year to continue his studies. In January 1929, Liang Qichao died of illness, when Liang Siyong had just arrived in the United States and could not return to China to mourn. In the summer of 1930, Liang Siyong obtained a master's degree from Harvard University, and after returning to China, he joined the "Institute of History and Linguistics of academia sinica".
Liang Siyong immediately participated in the "Northeast Archaeology Project" initiated by the Institute of History and Language of the Academia Sinica, successively excavated the site of Ang AngXi in Heilongjiang, and completed the first systematic archaeological survey of Northeast China in the Chinese at Rehe. Later, he went to Anyang, Henan to participate in the excavation of the Xiaotun Yin Ruins site and presided over the excavation of the Hougang ruins. In the autumn of 1931, he rushed to Shandong to participate in the second excavation of the longshan Chengziya site.
When it comes to Longshan culture, it is impossible not to mention Wu Jinding, the discoverer and determinant of the Chengziya site. Wu Jinding was born in 1901 in Anqiu, Shandong Province, in a farming family, farming for generations, but he was highly educated, and four men in Wu Jinding's generation were admitted to college, and all four girls completed at least junior high school. In 1919, Wu Jinding was admitted to the Department of Social History of the College of Arts and Sciences of Qilu University, and then stayed on to teach, and in 1926, he was admitted to the Institute of Tsinghua University to study anthropology, and then studied archaeology under Mr. Li Ji. A year later, he returned to his alma mater to continue teaching, and began to investigate the historical sites around Jinan, of which six purposeful inspections were made to Pingling City and the nearby Chengzi Cliffs in the two years from 1927 to 1928, and basically determined that Chengzi Cliffs were important historical sites.
Wu Jinding
At that time, Qilu University did not have independent archaeological qualifications and excavation conditions, and Wu Jinding told his mentor Li Ji of his discovery. At this time, the excavation of the "Historical Language Institute" archaeological team led by Li Ji in Anyang was affected by the Central Plains War and stopped, received the news provided by the students, immediately consulted with Fu Sinian and others, and jointly established the "Shandong Ancient Monuments Research Association" to carry out orderly excavations of the Chengziya site. Fu Sinian served as the chairman of the committee, Li Ji as the director, and the daily work was taken care of by Wu Jinding, who had been hired as an assistant researcher of the "Institute of History and Language", and after the first excavation, Wu Jinding was appointed as the head of the Shandong Antiquities Research Association until he went to study in britain. Immediately after the establishment of the Monuments Association, field work was carried out, and it was close to winter at that time, so it was chosen to start at Chengziya, which was more convenient in all aspects.
The first excavation was a month from November 7 to December 7, with six participants, including Li Ji, Dong Zuobin, Guo Baojun, and Wu Jinding. Using the method of archaeological stratigraphy, the "cultural layer" clearly visible on the cliff of the Chengziya terrace was found, and the most characteristic excavation of this excavation was black pottery, of which the black pottery cup was "black as lacquer, bright as a mirror, thin as paper, hard as porcelain, fluttering and flickering, knocking on ZhengZheng with sound." Since then, after Wu Jinding's collation, these newly discovered cultural relics have shown the overall face of Longshan culture.
Black pottery excavated by Yongsan culture
The first excavation of art is not as fruitful as the earlier Yin Ruins, but the discovery of Chengzi Cliff is too important for the advancement of Chinese archaeology, which can be said to be a milestone in the study of Chinese prehistoric culture. On November 6, 1930, the Shandong Historical Sites Research Society held a press conference on the Chengziya site at the School of Engineering of Shandong University, and Li Ji delivered a speech to summarize the first phase of excavation of the Chengziya site in stages, and fully affirmed the importance of the excavated black pottery remains in the study of Chinese prehistoric culture.
Liang Siyong proposed to be collectively referred to as "Longshan culture"
Inspired by the results of the first phase of excavations, the Shandong Society for the Study of Monuments immediately began a second excavation in the autumn of 1931, from October 9 to 31, led by Liang Siyong, Wu Jinding, two young archaeologists, as well as Wang Xiang and others. In the first excavation, due to the limitations of the knowledge structure of Li Ji and Dong Zuobin, as well as the defects in the relevant archaeological excavation technology, there were certain shortcomings in the excavation work. However, As a returnee from the United States and mastering modern archaeological knowledge and means, Liang Siyong has completely broken through traditional archaeological cognition and methods, especially in field archaeology, filling the gap left by the older generation of archaeologists such as Li Ji and Dong Zuobin. Li Ji recognized Liang Siyong's contribution in this regard. He once said: "Liang Jun is an archaeologist with fieldwork training and has done special research on archaeological issues such as East Asia. Over the past two years, he has made extremely important contributions to the organization and methodological aspects of the archaeological group. ”
Liang Siyong
Liang Siyong's greatest contribution to the excavation of the Chengziya site is that through the excavation of the Hougang site of The Yin Ruins in Anyang, he unearthed the relics of the black pottery period with the same culture as the lower culture of the Chengziya site, so as to conduct comparative research. He and Wu Jinding abandoned the stratigraphy of the first excavation, adopted the most advanced scientific archaeological method in the West - stratigraphy, and divided the cultural layers with reference to the accumulation of different soils, soil colors and inclusions of the Hougang site of Yin Ruins, successfully distinguished the ancient culture accumulation of different eras, and found that the "three stacks" of faience pottery- black pottery - Yin Ruins cultural remains were stacked in a certain order. Most of the pottery is handmade, but wheeling has emerged, these pottery is exquisite and unique in shape, unfortunately the production process has been lost. From the analysis of the excavated bones, Tsukiban and rammed earth, Liang Siyong concluded that the Chengziya culture and the Yin Shang culture were direct inheritance relations, and at the same time reflected the new understanding of the Yin Ruins architectural site. Excavations at the Chengziya site have for the first time found Neolithic remnants characterized by polished black pottery, which were originally called "black pottery culture" and later collectively referred to as "Longshan culture" by Liang Siyong.
Chengziya Archaeological Site
According to records, in the late stage of the second excavation of Chengziya, the torrential rain suddenly arrived, and the rain quickly filled several pits that had been dug more than a meter deep. According to past experience, the method is to wait for the puddle water to dry up naturally before continuing excavation, so it will take at least a week. After consultation, it was decided to adopt the suggestion made by Wu Jinding to borrow the villagers' buckets to drain the water in the pit, dry it, and re-excavate it as soon as possible. Liang Siyong and Wu Jinding personally went into battle and drained the water with migrant workers in waist-high water, ensuring that the excavation period was completed on time. The excavation, in addition to the Sunday rest, the actual work of 20 days, a single day up to 48 workers, excavation of 45 pits, a total area of 1520.8 square meters, excavation of antiquities a total of 60 boxes, transported from Longshan to Jinan Shandong Monuments Research Association preservation. In March 1932, the antiquities excavated for the second time at the Chengziya site were all sorted out by Wu Jinding, and the results of the excavation once again proved that the black pottery culture excavated from the Anyang Yin Ruins site and the Chengziya site were basically the same, which proved that Liang Siyong's previous inference was correct, and also corrected the Swedish archaeologist Anderson to mix the two Neolithic cultures of Yangshao and Longshan with very convincing data, and mistakenly concluded that "coarse pottery is earlier than colored pottery".
The first specialized archaeologist and the first field archaeologist in China
Liang Siyong was called "China's first specialized archaeologist" by his father Liang Qichao, and his close collaborator Wu Jinding was called "the first person in field archaeology" by later archaeologists. Wu Jinding's book "The Ancient Record of Pingling's Visit" was published in 1930 in the first volume and fourth volume of the "Proceedings of the Institute of History and Linguistics of the Academia Sinica", which vividly recounted the discovery and investigation of Chengziya. The collaboration between two young archaeologists began in the spring of 1931 when they traveled to Anyang to participate in the fourth excavation of yin ruins. At the beginning, they excavated together in Xiaotun, they had a vision of common development, and left Xiaotun on April 16 of that year to find their ideal place in the east and west. Liang Siyong went east and chose the Hougang site, and Wu Jinding went west, selected the site of Sipan mill, and then presided over the excavation of the site of Sipan mill.
Although these two sites are part of the Yin Ruins Site, their respective excavation teams can better reflect their understanding of modern archaeological science. In the autumn, for the common goal, the two people came together from Anyang Yin Ruins to Pingling City in Longshan, Jinan, to carry out the second excavation of the Chengziya site, and formed a deep friendship in archaeological practice. In the autumn of 1933, Wu Jinding was sent by the Shandong Provincial Government to the University of London in the United Kingdom to study modern archaeology and anthropology, under the tutelage of the famous Egyptian archaeology titan Professor Petri, and conducted on-site excavations in Palestine. He also went to the Central Higher School of Technology in London to practice the original method of making pottery. Professor Petri, 87 years old, praised his students, "Mr. Wu is indeed a good field worker, although he is not heroic and alert, but calm and cautious, and his work is rare." The Arab workers he excavated with him also gave a thumbs up, saying that Wu Jinding was "good". If Liang Siyong is "China's first specialized archaeologist", then Wu Jinding is "China's second specialized archaeologist".
In 1937, Wu Jinding received a doctorate in anthropology (archaeology) from the University of London for his treatise "Chinese Pottery", and it is no exaggeration to say that Wu Jinding was "the first Chinese to obtain a doctorate in anthropology (archaeology)". After returning to China, he successively led a team in the Preparatory Department of the "Institute of History and Language of the Academia Sinica" and the "Central Museum" to engage in archaeological investigation in Sichuan and Yunnan in the southwest region, and was known as the "founder of field archaeology in southwest China". After the end of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, Wu Jinding was resolutely invited to return to his alma mater, Qilu University, and successively served as the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, the director of the library and other positions, presided over the work of the Qi University Institute of Sciences, and contributed a lot to the demobilization of Qi University in Jinan and the recasting of glory.
Shi Zhangru, a famous archaeologist who has worked with Wu Jinding for many years at the Institute of History and Philology of the Academia Sinica, commented on his colleagues: "Mr. Wu is the discoverer of the Longshan culture, with about 20 field archaeological surveys, 84 sites obtained, 26 excavation sites, and is the initiator of field archaeology with female employees and the pioneer of field archaeology. From the prehistory of Shandong, to the Yin Zhou of Henan, to the Han of Pengshan in Sichuan, to the Tang and Song dynasties of Nanzhao Dali in Yunnan, and even to the five dynasties of Chengdu Qintai. Thousands of years of time, tens of thousands of miles of regions, rich experience, and cultural contributions, until now, in the field work, who can compare with him? He is the first person to be called a field archaeologist. ”
On September 20, 1948, Wu Jinding died of stomach cancer in Jinan at the age of 47. It is regrettable that the aspirations are high and the teachers are not successful. His close friend and fellow traveler in the archaeological career, Liang Siyong, entered the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences as deputy director after 1949, and died in Beijing on April 2, 1954, at the age of 50. Two archaeologists, together to explore the longshan cultural discovery, excavation and dissemination that influenced the world, have made great contributions to writing a touching story of Chinese cultural history.