Qianjiang Evening News Hourly News Reporter Yu Wenwen Correspondent Yu Jingyi
Which of the plants recorded in the Book of Poetry appear in the ruins of liangzhu ancient city?
What melons and fruits were planted by the ancestors of Liangzhu more than 5,000 years ago?
What was the crab in the "Crab Leaf Cang" used in the Liangzhu period?
Qianjiang Evening News Hourly News and the China Wetland Museum are launching a cultural lesson on "Wetland Plants in the Poetry Classic", where a number of experts will share their different interpretations of the poetry and take everyone into the grass and tree world of the poetry (for details, click here).
A special reminder is that the China Wetland Museum's "Grass and Trees Have Hearts - Poetry and Wetland Plant Culture Exhibition" is about to close, and there is time to remember to punch a card.
In today's small lesson, we invited Wu Xin, a librarian of the Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, who is mainly engaged in plant archaeology in Zhejiang Province, and has participated in the compilation of the Liangzhu Civilization Series, co-authoring "Wuhua Tianbao - Liangzhu Ancient Environment and Animals and Plants". This time she will talk about the botanical knowledge of the Book of Poetry from an archaeological point of view.
The relationship between people and plants is actually the relationship with nature, and the food, clothing, shelter and transportation that people rely on for survival are taken from nature, so the importance of plants to people is self-evident. The object of study of plant archaeology is the plant remains directly or indirectly related to human activities, in order to explain the history of the development of ancient human culture.
Of the more than three hundred articles in the Book of Verses, more than one hundred and forty of them mention plants, and according to statistics, there are 135 species.
The evolution of plants is actually relatively slow, and some of the plants mentioned in the Book of Poetry can still be seen today, and they also existed in the Liangzhu culture period 5,000 years ago, but the degree of evolution of some plants is different. Today, I will talk to you about some of the plants recorded in the "Book of Poetry" excavated from the Liangzhu site.
During the Liangzhu period, rice scale was large and yielded
The granary of Ikenakaji Temple can hold 200,000 kilograms of rice
Starchy foods can always give people a sense of satisfaction, in the early Neolithic Period, the level of agricultural production was low, gathering and hunting was the main way to obtain food, and some starch-rich foods such as diamond horns and acorns were favored by people. In the Liangzhu period, when the level of agricultural production was high, rice naturally became a staple food.
Regarding rice, there is this description in the Book of Verses: in June, henchong and 菽, in August the jujube is peeled, in October the rice is harvested, for this spring wine, to introduce meishou. - "July"
Rice, scientific name Asian cultivated rice (Oryza sativa), an annual aquatic herb of the family Poaceae, is a staple food for nearly half of the world's population. Among the archaeological discoveries in the lower Reaches of the Yangtze River, the earliest known era is rice excavated during the Shangshan culture period 10,000 years ago, which is a relatively primitive type of cultivated rice.
After thousands of years of domestication, during the Liangzhu culture period, rice farming was quite mature, the scale of production was large, the yield was high, and rice became the main source of food for the ancestors. The Maoshan ruins and shi'ao sites have found ancient rice field mounds with red-boiled earth paving and "well" glyph structures, and the rice field irrigation system is relatively perfect; in the ancient city of Liangzhu, rice (rice) remains have been found in many places, the largest amount is the granary of Chizhong Temple, and it is estimated that about 200,000 kilograms of rice are buried here.
▲ Carbonized rice excavated from the MojiaoShan site
▲ Carbonized rice layer excavated by archaeology
According to the difference in the planting environment, rice also has a morning and evening difference. Early rice is generally sown in March and April and harvested in July, while late rice is generally sown in June and harvested in October to November. The "October harvest" in "July" refers to late rice.
People of the Liangzhu period
I have begun to plant peach trees and eat melons
The peach is dying, scorching its glory...
Peach of death, there is a rut in fact...
The peach of death, its leaves...
- "Peach Dream"
Among the fruits of summer, peaches are marketed earlier. It is loved for its large size and sweet taste. Therefore, in the Book of Poetry, it is said that there are many and large peaches. There are 8,000-year-old peach cores unearthed in Zhejiang, but the cores at that time were relatively small, and the current judgment should be wild varieties. In the Liangzhu culture period, the peach core has been significantly enlarged, and the larger the peach core means that the peach is larger, indicating that it has been domesticated. That is to say, at that time, the people of Liangzhu were already planting and cultivating peach trees. From another level, it also shows that Zhejiang is one of the origins of modern peach.
After talking about the fruit, let's look at a melon.
There are several references to melons in the Book of Verses, such as:
Eat melon in July, break the pot in August, uncle Tho in September, pick the stick, eat my farmer. - "July"
Nakata has a house, and Xinjiang has a melon. It is peeling or peeling, offering the emperor ancestor. - "Letter to The South Mountain"
Gentle melon. - "The Scoop"
There are many types of melons, now common watermelon, cucumber, winter melon, pumpkin, melon, etc., of which watermelon, cucumber, pumpkin are introduced to China in different historical periods, winter melon and melon are native to China, at present, there is no prehistoric period winter melon remains, the earliest documentary records are also late to the Three Kingdoms period, plus the "July eating melon" season limit, so the melon eaten here can only be melon.
Melons have been found at some sites during the Liangzhu culture period, and according to research, melons at that time already had tastes, one is a sweet melon, and the other is a vegetable melon. In the Neolithic Age, with the development of time, the later the age, the proportion of melon types was higher than that of the melon type.
"Crab leaf" was made at that time
One of the materials of the straw mud bag
The appearance of reeds in the Book of Verses has a very beautiful picture, "the crab leaves are pale, and the white dew is frost; the so-called Yi people are on the side of the water."
In the "Compendium of Materia Medica", it is said that the first birth is a tribulus, before flowering is a reed, and after flowering it is a reed. Crab leaf refers to the reed that is born without a long spike. Reeds grow in pieces in ponds or shallow areas by rivers and streams, with tough stems and high fiber content, which can be used to process brooms, mats and other supplies.
When the ancestors of Liangzhu built dams and piled up Mojiao Mountain, they used a very simple and easy-to-use material - straw bale mud. That is, the swamp silt soil is dug up by the wooden mortar, and the grass stem is wrapped in the outer layer, the general specification is 40×10×8 (unit: cm), that is, the grass wrapped mud, the average weight of a piece is 6 kg.
After identification, it was found that the materials for wrapping and bundling the outer part of this straw bale mud were reeds and bamboo.
▲Unearthed straw mud bags
▲Straw bale mud on the section of the dam
In fact, the straw bale mud is similar to today's anti-flood sandbags, stacked layer by layer, and the grass stem in the middle can play a role in strengthening the tendons, which is a material that is repeatedly used in the Liangzhu period and even in later generations. Sometimes, these "straw mud bags" are used to be placed on the water surface of the dam to resist floods, and some are placed directly in low-lying areas as foundations.
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