The pattern of the origin and development of our civilization is different from that of the West, and does not meet Western standards such as writing, bronze, and cities. And "the 'three elements' summarized from the characteristics of the Two Rivers Basin and the ancient Egyptian civilization are not universal."
Writing is one of the elements of civilization of greatest concern. "If We pull Chinese civilization under the standard of 'three elements', one of our weakest elements is the relatively late emergence of writing." But "writing is actually a spiritual invention, which in ancient China may have been a manifestation of worship and rituals."
Western academic circles usually believe that the process of early human social development followed the "convergent evolution" model, but this convergence seems to be negated by us - the driving force of Chinese civilization may not be the same as Western civilization. "World civilization is a community of pluralistic learning, and at the same time it is necessary to recognize that there is enough diversity in the community, and each of them has rationality."
The status of Chinese archaeology and its international discourse power are gradually strengthening. "Now you find mainstream Western journals that study world archaeology, such as Antiquities, and almost every issue will publish articles about China, either on China or written by Chinese scholars themselves."
Chinese archaeology, which was once questioned for not being tested by modern science, has gone to heaven and earth, and the old appearance has been replaced by a new look - the first step in excavating the Liangzhu water conservancy system is not to pick up the Luoyang shovel, but to open the remote sensing image
Before his death, Zhang Zhongpei was also proofreading and revising his last three books: "Chinese Archaeology: Out of Your Own Way", "Chinese Archaeology: Speak Your Own Words", and "Chinese Archaeology: Doing Your Best"
Wen | Xu Oulu, a reporter for the news weekly "Lookout."
On September 29, 2021, liangzhu ancient city Yaoshan Ruins Park was opened on a trial basis, and the core of the site park is the "altar tomb one" composite site composed of the Yaoshan altar and 13 tombs distributed on the altar. This is the ruins of the Yaoshan Altar (left) and the Mantou Mountain Observatory Jiang Han photo/this magazine
When it comes to the origins of Chinese civilization, Wang Jun, a research librarian at the Palace Museum, always thinks of the summer of 2016.
In June of that year, he suddenly received a call from Zhang Zhongpei, the old dean and a famous archaeologist, asking him to come to his home with materials and draft a letter. Along with him from all over the country, liu bin, then director of the Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, and others.
Zhang Zhongpei believes that among the projects that have been included in the World Cultural Heritage List on the mainland, there is no site that can prove that Chinese civilization can be as early as 5,000 years ago. It is proposed that the Liangzhu site be declared a world cultural heritage site on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the founding of New China in 2019, "setting a symbol for China's 5,000-year civilization".
On the day the first draft was formed, Zhang Zhongpei, who was seriously ill, was very happy, and everyone specially tasted a meal of Peking duck.
At that time, Liangzhu was still ranked behind the long list of applicants. Although the Ruins of Duyi, located in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River and dating back about 5,300 to 4,300 years, have constantly refreshed people's understanding of Chinese civilization: since the 1980s, high-grade cemeteries, altars, jade ceremonial systems, large palace sites, a three-fold city site with a total area of nearly 8 square kilometers, and a huge water conservancy system have been discovered here. Entering the early national stage, there is no longer much doubt.
The letter, which was finally signed by Su Bai, Xie Chensheng, Huang Jingluo and Zhang Zhongpei, four elders of the archaeological and cultural circles, wrote: "We are confident that the Liangzhu site is a well-deserved witness to China's 5,000 years of civilization. ”
This testimony, Chinese, has been asked for a hundred years.
The starting point was a newsletter in the 1923 Weekly Journal of Efforts. There, a young scholar argued in his theory that the ancient Chinese imperial system should be attributed to legend, and even the Xia Dynasty was not very reliable. The ancient history system of "Three Emperors and Five Emperors Xia Shang Zhou" constructed since the "Records of History", as well as the "Five Thousand Years of China" based on this, have been in turmoil for a while.
In 1921, the Swede Anderson discovered the Yangshao cultural site in Shichi, Henan, which began modern Chinese archaeology. However, "blows" followed, and Anderson believed that the faience ornamentation of Yangshao culture had similarities with Central Asia, and proposed that "Yangshao culture is said to be in the west". The Chinese civilization that lasted for one or two hundred years was heavy in the west.
At the juncture when the nation is "in a difficult position," people wonder whether the Chinese nation "is really aging or still young and strong"? Where did China come from and where is it going?
The appearance of Chinese archaeologists put an end to the controversy for the time being. In 1926, archaeological excavations in Xiyin Village, Shanxi Province, began to bankrupt "Xilao", and excavations of the Yin Ruins site in Anyang confirmed the history of the late Shang Dynasty.
However, for a long time, international scholars believed that ancient China entered the civilized society only from the discovery of a large number of bronzes and has been proved by the oracle bones of the late Shang Dynasty. According to this view, the history of Chinese civilization is 3300 years ago.
In this regard, Xia Nai, one of the founders of modern Chinese archaeology, commented that the Xiaotun YinXu culture is a highly developed civilization. If this is the birth of Chinese civilization, it is a bit like the legendary Lao Tzu, who was born with a white beard.
The question is, where is that young "Lao Tzu"?
"Three good students" Liangzhu
"The Liangzhu site is a sacred place to empirically prove the history of China's 5,000-year civilization" – In July 2003, Xi Jinping, then secretary of the Zhejiang Provincial Party Committee, made an important judgment on the historical status of the site.
In 2016, famous archaeologists Su Bai, Xie Chensheng, Huang Jingluo and Zhang Zhongpei sent a letter to General Secretary Xi Jinping, hoping to promote the early declaration of the Liangzhu site as a world cultural heritage. General Secretary Xi Jinping made important instructions on this: "It is necessary to strengthen the effective protection of ancient sites, carry out systematic archaeological excavations in a focused manner, and continuously deepen the understanding of the long history and valuable value of Chinese civilization." ”
Liangzhu applied for heritage into the fast lane.
An important part of the application materials is to expound their own "outstanding universal value". Out of six established criteria, the Expert Group selected the third article, which "provides a unique or exceptional testimony to existing or obsolete civilizations or cultural traditions", and the fourth, which "is an excellent example of a certain type of architecture, building technique or landscape at a particular stage or in human history".
This application must be repeatedly examined and questioned by experts organized by the World Heritage Committee and its professional assessment agencies. Each Contracting State can only make one nomination per year, and each year there are "losers" who are not on the World Heritage List. In contrast, Liangzhu's application performance is like a "three good students".
September 2018 was the most important comprehensive assessment. As an important discoverer of the Liangzhu water conservancy system, Wang Ningyuan, a researcher at the Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, accompanied the entrusted experts of the International Council of Monuments and Sites to inspect the water conservancy system. Before the on-site inspection, the expert had written to propose that he wanted to know the details of china's ancient water conservancy and Liangzhu water conservancy system, and he and his colleagues specially arranged for water conservancy experts to carry out two reports on "China's Water Conservancy History" and "Liangzhu Water Conservancy System".
Qin Ling, an associate professor at Peking University's School of Archaeology and Archaeology, was also present at the assessment, and she remembers that the atmosphere was "very relaxed." One day it was raining heavily, I couldn't go out, my schedule was disrupted, and even then the expert was "happy." She talked about her arid hometown and said that it was "good" to enjoy the rain in Jiangnan.
Wang Ningyuan's impression is that the materials that need to be added in the end are "small problems at the operational level" and "there is no doubt about the value assessment at all". Qin Ling remembered that the questions asked by the mid-term review were almost all about the implementation of conservation management measures, "which shows that all the academic values we have proposed are recognized."
In the spring of 2019, Wang Wei, chairman of the Chinese Archaeological Society, was invited by the Ministry of Education to participate in the revision of the origin of civilization section of junior high school textbooks. He suggested adding Liangzhu to an early civilization. This opinion was adopted, but for the sake of prudence, the Group added a sentence to the front: "Some scholars believe".
This sentence was finally removed a few days before the textbook was about to be printed – on July 6 of that year, at the 43rd session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in Baku, Azerbaijan, the ruins of liangzhu ancient city were approved for inscription on the World Heritage List.
In the final "official" description of the heritage, the World Heritage Committee wrote that the ruins of the ancient city of Liangzhu (c. 3300-2300 BC) in the Yangtze River Delta on the southeast coast of China show a unified regional state in the late Neolithic period, supported by rice farming. The site consists of four parts: yaoshan ruins area, Gukou high dam area, plain low dam area and city site area. Through large earthen architecture, urban planning, water conservancy systems, and social hierarchies embodied in different forms of burial, these sites became outstanding examples of early urban civilization.
Qin Ling believes that this is the result of repeated deliberation and questioning within a strict academic framework, and it is a time coordinate that clarifies the origin of early Chinese civilization on an important international stage from five thousand years ago.
This is reminiscent of the chiseled words in the letter: "As early as five or six thousand years ago, in the land of China, the form of the state has emerged." At that time, the form of the state (political power) was the kingdom of the gods and kings who attached equal importance to theocracy and the royal power, and the later evolution was that the royal power was increasingly higher than the divine power, and by the Xia, Shang, and Zhou Dynasties, a dynastic kingdom power form above the divine power was formed; the Great Changes in the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, to the development of the Qin Dynasty Empire, followed by the 'Qin government system for hundreds of generations'. The orderly inheritance of Chinese civilization for five thousand years is no longer a problem. ”
"They basically followed what we wrote." Speaking of the final assessment, Wang Ningyuan was quite confident.
In his view, the success of Liangzhu's application for heritage is a natural success, "no suspense". On the day of the vote, Wang Ningyuan and his colleagues, who were sitting at the Azerbaijani venue, had no time to feel the liveliness of the scene, because they had to help prepare for the first time to publish the domestic newspaper manuscript of the successful application for the heritage.
Photo: Black pottery, jade, clogs, lacquerware (bottom row from left) excavated from liangzhu cultural sites ( from left in the upper row ) , pottery pieces and jade bi Photo by Weng Xinyang / This magazine
China's Neolithic period is far from being underestimated
After getting to know Liangzhu, Colin Lunfuru, an academician of the British Academy of Social Sciences and a titan of international archaeology, said this to the media: China's Neolithic era is far undervalued.
Qin Ling believes that the fundamental reason for the underestimation is that the development model of the origin of our civilization is different from that of the West, and does not meet the Western standards of writing, bronze, and cities.
Unlike other early civilizations in Eurasia, the Liangzhu civilization had neither bronze nor a recognized writing system.
But what comes up here is impressive. Magnificent royal cities, huge engineering water conservancy systems, highly skilled handicrafts, tombs with obvious grade differentiation... Wang Ningyuan said that the city walls, outer cities and dam bodies of liangzhu ancient cities, together with the amount of earthwork for the tall piles of mojiao mountain foundations, totaled about 11 million cubic meters. If mining, transportation and stacking of 1 cubic meter of soil and stone each require 1 person / day, 300,000 people are produced every year, and the entire project must be built continuously for 110 years. Behind it is a complete set of systems such as planning and design, distribution and scheduling, logistics support and project quality monitoring.
"The class division of Liangzhu society has become quite serious, and the supreme ruler has mastered the power of military command and the power to preside over sacrifices and convey the will of the gods, and has possessed extraordinary authority and ability to mobilize and organize manpower. If it had not entered civilized society, it would have been completely unthinkable. Wang Wei said.
He still remembers that when he went to Japan to study in 1987, he found that Japanese books began with Chinese civilization from Yin Ruins, and "no one mentioned it at all for five thousand years", leaving him "shocked". "They emphasize the three criteria of writing, metallurgy, and the city." He began to have the idea of studying the history of civilization.
26 years later, the first World Archaeological Forum was held in Shanghai, and under the suggestion of Wang Wei, who was already the chief expert of the "Chinese Civilization Exploration Project", the theme was set as "Comparative Study of Ancient Civilizations". More than 200 world-renowned archaeologists were invited to participate, and a considerable number of them visited and even learned about Liangzhu for the first time.
Visiting the complete cheng, Wang Wei asked Lun Furu, we think Liangzhu has entered the civilized society, what do you think? Renfrew replied: This is not civilization, what is civilization?
"The 'three elements' summarized from the characteristics of the Two Rivers Valley and the ancient Egyptian civilization are not universal." Wang Wei explained that the Maya civilization in Central America had no metallurgy, and the Inca civilization in South America did not use writing, and these were all recognized civilizations in the world.
Wang Ningyuan once heard Lun Furu talk about the standards of civilization, and the other party believed that those few elements did not necessarily have to meet each of them, and the criteria for judging civilization varied from place to place.
"The regions where civilizations have developed around the world and the resources they occupy are not the same, the environment is different, and different regional civilizations will also develop." Li Shuicheng, chair professor of liberal arts at Sichuan University and professor at Peking University's School of Archaeology and Archaeology, said.
He cites metallurgy as an example, the essence of metal smelting is handicrafts, and another manifestation in China is jade-making. At the site of Xiaonanshan in Raohe, Heilongjiang, jade ornaments dating back 9,000 years have been unearthed. "Chinese has always regarded jade as an elegant, rich, beautiful, and mysterious substance, and jade has five virtues, namely benevolence, righteousness, wisdom, courage, and tongjie. Jade is thus endowed with some kind of supermaterial strange divine power, which becomes a symbol of personal power, status and rank. In this context, both Hongshan and Liangzhu cultures have developed a developed jade culture and jade manufacturing industry. He said.
Four or five thousand years ago, Liangzhu craftsmen, under the conditions of tools at that time, could carve five or six lines within a millimeter of width, and today's jade masters are also willing to bow to the wind.
"Behind the jade manufacturing is a very complex industrial system, to some extent, the difficulty of mining and making jade is no less than that of bronze." Li Shuicheng said, "One of the characteristics of oriental civilization is the civilization element represented by jade. ”
In his view, a one-way indicator could not simply be used as a unified criterion for delineating complex events. "Chinese pottery has appeared nearly 20,000 years ago, and the West has not appeared pottery until 10,000 years ago.
Charcoal pottery pieces doped with rice husks on display at Shangshan Archaeological Site Park (photo taken on May 12, 2021) Photo by Huang Zongzhi / This issue
Where is the right line?
How to judge civilization or not has been discussed in the academic community for decades. At present, the mainstream view at home and abroad believes that the emergence of the state is the fundamental symbol of the emergence of civilization.
There is also a considerable consensus among domestic academic circles on what a state is: society is divided into different classes, there are coercive public powers, there are specialized governing bodies, there are spiritual beliefs or ideologies that embody the will of rulers, and society has a pyramidal hierarchical structure.
"Many of the characteristics of the country can be identified by archaeological findings." Wang Wei said that one of its biggest features is the emergence of royal power, and the corresponding archaeological remains include capitals, palaces, tombs, ceremonial vessels and so on.
In December 2021, Wang Wei said in an interview with reporters that the "Chinese Civilization Exploration Project" is mainly based on the archaeological discoveries of several Duyi sites such as Liangzhu, Tao Temple, Shi'an, Shijiahe, etc., combined with the archaeological results of other central sites, and referring to the situation of other ancient civilizations in the world, summarizing the key characteristics of entering the civilized society from archaeological discoveries in the absence of text discoveries at that time:
Remarkable progress was made in prehistoric agriculture and handicrafts; some handicrafts with high technical content were specialized and controlled by the elite; there was a significant concentration of the population, forming cities; the social divide between rich and poor and noble and the inferior was increasingly serious, forming an aristocratic class that held the wealth and power of society; the society formed a pyramid-like social structure, and a king who stood at the top of the pyramid and concentrated military command, social management and religious sacrifice power; blood relations were still preserved and combined with geographical relations. It played an important role in maintaining society; violence and war became a relatively common social phenomenon; a regional polity governed by the crown and a bureaucratic management institution subordinate to the king was formed.
He pointed out that when a society has most of the above phenomena, it can be judged that it has entered a civilized society.
Although there are slight differences in detail, this generally represents the opinion of a considerable number of archaeologists.
Some scholars believe that civilization and the real state are two levels. Li Shuicheng believes that strictly speaking, the origin of civilization belongs to the pre-national stage. "If a society develops to the extent of having large-scale public works construction, it should have the conditions for civilization." This means that you have to mobilize all social resources, and behind them at least there must be corresponding political organizations, managers, and the highest authority and a samurai control class like the modern police. ”
Some scholars also argue that there is no need to rush to apply specific criteria, but should first focus on the process of "civilization" of various sites or archaeological cultures, and make judgments in comparison with other civilizations.
More than 30 years after studying the origin of civilization, Chen Xingcan, director of the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told reporters that considering the complexity of the origin of civilization, it is indeed "difficult" to define. "The formation of civilization is a process, like a spectrum, where does the dividing line draw? When talking about the origin of the state or the origin of civilization, the biggest problem is this, it does not have a sharp demarcation line, maybe you draw the first 1/3, I draw the last 1/3. ”
Li Shuicheng is more inclined to understand the "origin of civilization" as "the process of social complexity", which means that the corresponding is not a time point, but a time period, "civilization does not mean that one step will be crossed.".
Discussions continue. But overall, Wang Wei feels that the academic community's understanding of civilization for decades has continued to "go from appearance to essence."
This is also accompanied by awareness of more sites. The research results of the "Chinese Civilization Source Exploration Project" released in 2018 believe that "around 5800 years ago, there were signs of civilization origin in the Yellow River, the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River and the Xiliao River" and other regions.
Chen Xingcan feels that more and more Western scholars are accepting new evidence, and some historians or archaeologists who know something about China will no longer determine the origin of Chinese civilization in the Shang, but like many Chinese scholars, they will go back to the Erlitou era around 3700 years ago or the Longshan era 4000 to 500 years ago.
"Liangzhu is not only the source of China's civilization for more than 5,000 years, but also the earliest civilization in East Asia." Renfrew said.
A few years ago, he simply took Liangzhu as a case study and wrote it into the latest edition of his textbook Archaeology: Theory, Methods and Practice, published in many countries around the world.
A question of words
But the controversy has not stopped.
In 2020, a year after Liangzhu successfully applied for heritage, Xia Hanyi's new book "Ancient History New Voice" was published as a review and response to the important and influential Cambridge Ancient History of China, which was co-edited by him more than 20 years ago.
The well-known sinologist from the University of Chicago admits: "Due to the continuous development of archaeology, the study of ancient history is in one of the most active stages in Chinese history. For twenty years, the earth did not love treasure, and the archaeology of the Shang and Zhou Dynasties has discovered earth-shattering cultural relics every year, prompting historians to call for rewriting ancient Chinese history. ”
But he insisted that "the book has not lost its value" and that "the basic idea is correct." One of the basic ideas of this is that The "history" of China began in the late Shang Dynasty. "As a Western academic work, the Cambridge History of Ancient China naturally adheres to the definition of Western historiography, and only after having written materials can it be regarded as entering the era of 'history'." He wrote.
For a long time, writing has been one of the elements of civilization of greatest concern.
"If We pull Chinese civilization under the standard of 'three elements', one of our weakest elements is the relatively late emergence of writing." Li Shuicheng said.
The current mainstream view is that the origin of the Chinese script is the Yin Shang oracle bone. The question, then, is, what does the emergence or absence of writing have to do with entering the stage of civilization?
Some scholars argue that writing was not necessary for the emergence of early civilizations. "Many of the world's early civilizations did not have writing, such as the Inca civilization; there were some societies in the north of the continent that entered the early countries, did not have writing at first, and then created their own writing in a very short period of time." Chen Xingcan said.
"Writing is actually a spiritual invention, which in ancient China may have been a sacrifice to gods and rituals." Wang Wei once again stressed that to judge whether to enter the early civilization, we must grasp the "key characteristics" of the country.
Some scholars have pointed out that writing is indeed an important civilizational trait, but it has not been discovered at present, which does not mean that there is none.
"We can say that writing is a sign of a mature stage of civilization, such as yin shang. But the oracle bone has been very mature and complete, the creation of the text can not be achieved overnight, there may be a very long period of development before. Li Shuicheng said, "For example, the hieroglyphs of the Two Rivers Basin have undergone thousands of years or even longer of development before they really developed into alphabetic scripts." ”
It's just that the discovery of words is "unattainable." Li Shuicheng pointed out that the carrier of the Chinese characters before the oracle bone is not excluded as organic matter, and the basic control areas of Xia, Shang and Zhou are all in northern China, and it is difficult to retain organic matter in the northern environment.
There is also a view that Chinese characters that predate the Oracle have emerged. Feng Shi, a member of the Faculty of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a researcher at the Institute of Archaeology, pointed out: "The Cultural Site of Dinggonglongshan in Zouping, Shandong, which is slightly earlier than tao temple, has unearthed a script with written characteristics, which is very different from the Chinese character system and is the ancestor of the Oriental Yi script. This fact proves that the ancient civilization of the pre-national era was not unified by Huayi, but presented a pattern of Yixia and East and West. Exploring the origin of Chinese characters from this perspective can not only find the Dongyi script of Liangzhu culture and Dawenkou culture, but also trace the origin of this Yi script system all the way back to the Jiahu site 8,000 years ago. ”
"I'm not the same thing as you"
In Qin Ling's view, the success of Liangzhu's application for heritage is not a definition for the Western academic community, but a theoretical understanding of the early social development process of Eurasia.
In the final stage of Liangzhu's application for heritage, there was only one academic inquiry from the International Council on Monuments and Sites – hoping to provide a supplementary material on "the status of rice cultivation and rice species research".
Qinling was once a bit "strange", and international experts "did not understand", but rice that was familiar to Chinese archaeologists and even ordinary people.
Prior to this, there was not a single site of rice cultivation in the World Heritage Site, and the ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Indus civilizations were all based on typical wheat farming. In the face of this ancient oriental country that has discovered the remains of rice 10,000 years ago, "they want to understand how important rice cultivation is to the origin of civilization." The scholar who studies plant archaeology explains.
In addition to rice cultivation, there is also soil ruins. Compared with large stone-based monumental sites in the West, such as Stonehenge and pyramids, most of the East Asian sites represented by Liangzhu are built of earth, buried in the ground, have poor visibility, and are often underestimated. Qin Ling believes that the liangzhu application for heritage has successfully improved not only the international academic community's understanding of China, but also the civilization model of the entire East Asian region. One example is that after the successful application for the Liangzhu Heritage, the Jomon prehistoric sites in northern Japan, which had been on the preliminary list for many years, were also successfully inscribed on the World Heritage List last year.
Behind these differences, there is a reflection on the origin and evolution of civilization: Did the development model of ancient China experience a different path from other civilizations? Can existing foreign theories be applied to China's practice?
When applying for heritage in Liangzhu, it is necessary to compare and analyze the projects applied for heritage with the existing world cultural heritage. Qin Ling and the expert group repeatedly evaluated, and the results found that "it is not right".
On the one hand, without recognized writing and bronze technology, Liangzhu Ancient City is undoubtedly defined as a Neolithic cultural heritage, which needs to be compared with other Neolithic World Heritage Sites, but in this way, Liangzhu is too "advanced"; on the other hand, the degree of social and material cultural development shown by Liangzhu Ancient City is undoubtedly a model of early cities, which needs to be included in the scope of urban civilization and compared with other representative cities of early civilization, but the vast majority of the latter is a bronze society that has produced writing.
Qin Ling said that Western academic circles usually believe that the process of early human social development follows the "convergent evolution" model, that is, early human society, especially the Old World, will evolve along similar tracks. The emergence of civilizations such as Mesopotamia, Indus, and ancient Egypt was achieved through a leap in productivity along with the "secondary industrial revolution". Secondary development of metallurgical technology and livestock produced animal power, ploughing and wheels, the emergence of cash crops, driving the trade in daily necessities, which in turn drove expansion. This process occurred mainly in the late Neolithic and Bronze Ages. Therefore, it is understandable that the West regards the "Shang Civilization" of Yin Ruins as a comparable representative of the East.
"But this convergence seems to be negated by us." She said that from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age, China's agricultural model has always been a land use model with crop economy as the mainstay, and even after the land management system has changed, the agricultural economic model has not undergone leaps and bounds. This means that we are not promoting the complexity of society based on the resulting trade in commodities or controlling trade networks. The dynamics of Chinese civilization may not be the same as that of Western civilization.
She believes that the successful application for the liangzhu ancient city site marks that from the height of the common cultural heritage of mankind, a theory and development model of civilization origin that is different from the mainstream of the West is proposed - a series of regional state forms of the late Neolithic period of China represented by the liangzhu ancient city site are both universal and diverse in the process of the origin and development of early civilization in East Asia, and they are parallel to the Western civilization process with the West Asian Mediterranean as the core and can reflect each other two models, which provides the Western world with a better understanding of China from a historical perspective. Understanding China provides empirical evidence, and it also has very far-reaching significance and long-term impact on re-understanding the development process of human civilization.
"World civilization is a community of pluralistic learning, and at the same time it is necessary to recognize that there is enough diversity in the community, and each of them has rationality." Qin Ling said, "I feel that we have a responsibility to keep challenging, not to say how important and great we are, but to say that I am different from you, so as to reflect on how to understand the so-called model." ”
As for the change, she feels that it has already happened — some international archaeologists, when proposing theories, are less and less rash in emphasizing universality, but more cautiously adding a premise that it is regional.
On December 14, 2019, members of the Environmental Archaeology Team of Lanzhou University collected sediment DNA samples Photo/Journal
Rediscover China
"Four or five thousand years ago, the society in which early civilizations appeared was far from Being Liangzhu, and we have seen a lot in archaeology." Chen Xingcan said.
Not long ago, he had just traveled to Gansu to participate in the inspection of the Nanzuo site. Just last year, a well-defined "palace area" and a large "palace-like" building were discovered here, and an area of about 6 million square meters was discovered in the "outer ring trench", which is regarded as another large settlement site dating back about 5,000 years.
"Can you think of this in the past?" Simply unimaginable. "The 100 years of archaeological practice have completely reconstructed China's prehistory." ”
Zhang Guangzhi, a prominent Chinese-American archaeologist, once wrote: "We are in the golden age of Chinese archaeology because we have the opportunity to witness the creation of a new prehistoric knowledge system involving a quarter of the world's population." After witnessing the major discovery of the Sanxingdui sacrifice pit in the 1980s, he said, "I will not be surprised if there are any archaeological discoveries in China in the future." ”
It's just that today's Chinese archaeology is in a very different environment than it was a hundred years ago. Chinese archaeology, which was once questioned and has not been tested by modern science, has gone to heaven and earth, and the old appearance has been replaced by a new look. The first step for Wang Ningyuan and his colleagues to excavate the Liangzhu water conservancy system was not to pick up the Luoyang shovel, but to open the remote sensing image.
Li Shuicheng, who has been a visiting scholar at Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford and many other world-renowned universities, has noticed that since the new century, many schools in Europe and the United States have set up the direction of East Asian archaeology or Chinese archaeology. He attributed this to "the gradual strengthening of the status of Chinese archaeology and the international discourse power."
"Now you find mainstream Western journals that study world archaeology, such as Antiquities, and almost every issue will publish articles about China, either on China or written by Chinese scholars themselves." Chen Xingcan said.
The low-key archaeologist proudly told reporters that in the past, some Western scholars felt that in the study of China, Chinese materials can be used, and conclusions and research cannot be used. But now, "I can't hide from it."
What doesn't change is the percussion of "who we are and how we are formed."
Wang Ningyuan often thinks of Shi Xingen, the discoverer of Liangzhu. More than 80 years ago, the assistant of the geological and mining team of the West Lake Museum discovered the excavation of Liangzhu and wrote the first report of Liangzhu on the exile road of the Japanese invasion of China. "If he delays a little, the report will not come out, and whether this site can be recognized later or not is a matter of two things." Wang Ningyuan said, however, "He did not stop."
Now, Wang Ningyuan is the only one of the 15 students in the class who is still digging in the field on the front line. He says he likes the feeling of "solving the puzzle."
After returning from studying in Japan, Wang Wei hesitated between East Asian archaeology and Xia Shang Zhou archaeology, asked his teacher Zhang Zhongpei for advice, and Mr. Zhang pondered for a moment and said word by word - "return to the main battlefield".
Zhang Zhongpei ultimately failed to wait for Liangzhu to successfully apply for the will. Before his death, he was also proofreading and revising his last three books: "Chinese Archaeology: Out of Your Own Way", "Chinese Archaeology: Speak Your Own Words", and "Chinese Archaeology: Doing Your Best".
"Chinese archaeological research has come out of the simple 'evidence and supplementary history', and Chinese archaeology has completed the transformation from cultural history research to social research." Chen Xingcan said. As one of the leaders, the fifth phase of the Chinese Civilization Exploration Study has been launched in 2020, with a view to improving the understanding of the social development of the northern region, the Central Plains region and the Yangtze River region by focusing on 13 key sites.
In the interview, he always stressed that the exploration of the source of civilization is a rigorous academic issue, "relying on evidence to speak."
Although the exploration required to "speak" may be as long as the history they are pursuing. "I look forward to more new archaeological discoveries showing the historical context, brilliant achievements and contributions to human civilization of the origin and development of Chinese civilization." Wang Wei said. ■