□ Lacquer Yang
The humanistic ancestor Fuxi lived in the Paleogene period about 6000 or 7000 years ago, with today's water and gangu as the center of the region, and the prehistoric civilization Shilingxia type of faience pottery ornaments connected with the Fuxi era were obviously influenced by the Fuxi ancestor culture. The early period of the Shilingxia type of faience pottery was about 5500 years ago, and was first discovered in 1947 by archaeologist Mr. Pei Wenzhong in the western suburbs of Wushan County in The Village of Shiling in Zhoujia.
According to the book "Painted Pottery" by Lang Shude and Mr. Jia Jianwei, Mr. Pei and his party found 39 prehistoric sites in Tianshui, Gangu and Wushan in the Weihe River Basin, and 24 in Xihe, Lixian and Chengxian counties in the Western Han River Basin. This is the first archaeological survey of prehistoric civilization in Gansu by Chinese scholars. In 1976, when compiling the article "From the Majiayao Type to Vasiliev's "Chinese Culture to the West"", the Yuncheng Archaeological Excavation Team of the Archaeology Department of the Department of History of Peking University first proposed the new cultural name of "Shilingxia Type", and concluded from the stratigraphic overlapping relationship and carbon 14 measurement that the type of faience under Shiling was between the Miaodigou type and the Majiayao type.
On the afternoon of August 22, 2009, my friends and I visited Shiling Village in Zhoujia, Wushan, looking for Mr. Pei Wenzhong's footprints, and met a 77-year-old man at the head of the village, who clearly remembered that between July and August 1947, Mr. Pei and his party dug out several faience pots in the wasteland at the head of the village. Later, the villagers also dug out clay pots on the hillside west of the village, and they smashed them because they didn't look good. We found the clearing where Mr. Pei found the faience pottery, and the stone stele of the cultural relics protection unit was hidden in the barren grass, which was far from the birthplace of the sacred shilingxia type in my mind. We crossed a ditch in the west of the village that had been a babbling stream, and the pottery pieces in the soil layer on the hillside were almost within reach, but unfortunately we did not find a complete pottery.
Representatives of the fine faience pottery under Shilingxia are two "human-faced salamander pattern faience vases" excavated from Fujiamen Village in Wushan and Shiping Village in Gangu County, as well as "variant salamander pattern faience vases" excavated in 1978 in Shigouping, Lixian County.
Fu Jiamen unearthed a salamander-patterned faience vase
Fu Jiamen human face salamander pattern faience vase, now in the Gansu Provincial Museum, found in 1958 in Fujiamen Village, Horsepower Management Area, Xinsi Commune, Wushan County, height 18.5 cm, salamander body curled up, tail upturned, human face round eyes, wide mouth, jaw whiskers, abdomen fat, the front two limbs open, the pattern is networked, smooth lines, symmetrical layout, the head line is relatively thick, the creator consciously highlights the salamander head decoration. Salamander, called baby fish in the Tianshui area, has human characteristics and is regarded as a god by the ancestors. The image of the salamander on the Fujiamen faience pottery personifies the salamander as a human deity, and combines the dragon and snake representing wind, rain, thunder and electricity with the human head representing the wisdom of man, reflecting the concept of the unity of heaven and man of the ancestors. This faience vase is exactly the same as the image of the "dragon body and human head" recorded in classics such as the "Shan Hai Jing Hai Jing Hai Dong Jing" and Tang Sima Zhen's "Supplementary Three Emperors Benji", and the academic community generally believes that the human face salamander is the personified human head dragon body, or the human face snake body of the Fuxi image.
Fujiamen prehistoric cultural site of about 1200 square meters, located in fujiamen village, Mali Town, Wushan County, the village's cultural people themselves are clever in the late 1990s for children to go to school to write conveniently, fu simplified to Fu, the whole village Fu surname changed to Fu. Outside scholars do not know why, thinking that Wushan has two administrative villages, Fujiamen and Fujiamen, and have unearthed salamander-patterned pottery vases respectively. The Fujiamen site is located in the north of the village, on the secondary terrace of the Bangsha River, with a flat terrain behind the mountains and water, and was first discovered in 1958 when the Gansu Provincial Museum census of cultural relics.
In 1981, the Ganqing task force of the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences conducted another review and determined that it was an ancient relic of the Majiayao culture. From 1991 to 1993, Mr. Zhao Xin and others of the Institute of Archaeology conducted five excavations before and after.
Salamander pattern faience vase excavated from Gangu Xiping
According to Mr. Zhao Xin's "Briefing on the Excavation of Fujiamen Prehistoric Cultural Site in Wushan, Gansu" (hereinafter referred to as the "Briefing"), in the early 1990s, 11 Shilingxia type, Majiayao type, Qijia type housing sites, 14 cellars, 2 tombs, 1 sacrifice pit, and nearly 1,000 stones, bones, pottery and other utensils were cleared out of the Fujiamen site. There are 3 sites belonging to the type of house under the stone ridge, 6 pieces of yin carved bones excavated from the F11 housing site; 1 tomb, which is a rectangular vertical pit tomb, with residual pottery pots and animal bones, etc.; 1 sacrifice pit, rectangular, buried with faience pots and pebbles; more than 200 pieces of production tools and ornaments have been unearthed, including stone axes, stone chisels, stone knives, bone cones, pottery spinning wheels, etc.; clay red pottery accounts for the majority, there are bowls, pots, bottles, urns, cylinders, cups, pots, koji; ornamentation of multi-variant bird patterns, triangular patterns. The "Briefing" believes that this batch of faience pottery based on bird patterns is exactly the same as the faience pottery excavated under the stone ridge, and the ornamentation and vessel type are similar to the same type of style as the Gangu gray field.
The Fujiamen site also found a combination of painted and kneaded human face patterns, such as the human face faience vase, the half of the mouth of the bottle lips pressed into a jagged symbol of the hairline, the neck painted half of the human face, the nose bulging, the nostrils carved into a round hole, painted willow leaf-shaped eyebrows, round eyes. A total of 6 pieces of bones with yin carved symbols were found, including yin carved {shape symbols, S-shaped symbols, and one-shaped symbols, and there were burn marks on the back of the bones, which should be the physical objects of divination sacrifices. Mr. Xie Duanju's article "Chinese Primitive Bones" argues that this "indicates that divination customs appeared in the Majiayao culture about 5600 years ago", filling the gap in the Majiayao culture and providing new information for the study of the origin of the text.
The funerary items in the tombs and sacrifice pits of Fujiamen Village reflect the customs and habits of the ancestors of the Pangsha River Basin around 6,000 years. Due to the lack of documentation, we can only speculate on three symbols. The S-shaped symbol of the bone should be a simplified form of the Taiji diagram of the Yin Yang Fish of Fuxi, and the symbol is beautiful and symmetrical as a whole, which may be a mark of the ancestors recording the information of divination auspiciousness. {Shape symbol, symmetrical up and down, but the overall lack of symmetrical stability, presumably the symbol of the ancestors to record the omen. A symbol, smooth and simple, may be that the divination result is not auspicious, there is no fierce symbol, or it may be the symbol of the ancestors recording the numbers, which sees through the ancestors' understanding of the Tao sheng one, one life two, two life three, three life all things. According to Mr. Zhao Kuifu's research ("The Origin and Evolution of the Eight-Position System and the Bagua"), the rope pattern on the pottery is the product of the ancient people's knotted rope chronicle, and it is also the source of the yang and yin in the bagua. All of this is closely related to the founding of Fuxi Bagua, and the history of mainland divination has advanced by hundreds of years.
The human-faced salamander pattern faience vase and human face faience pottery vase unearthed by Fujiamen, as well as a large number of variants of bird pattern and vortex triangular pattern faience pottery, witnessed the imprint of the Fuxi culture centered on Tianshui and Gangu in the Wushan Bangsha River Basin in the Weihe River Basin, and used the simple artistic imagination of romanticism to illustrate the transformation of the ancestors in this area from the worship of fish and frogs representing female yin to the worship of snakes, dragons, birds and lizards representing male roots, to the transformation of Fuxi worship representing the image of dragons and snakes representing wind and thunder and lightning. This shift is rooted in the expectations of the survival needs of the ancestors. The greatest catastrophe facing mankind in ancient times was the flood. The ancestors living in this area were often threatened by floods, and when faced with torrential rains, they believed that the sky was broken and the water of the Heavenly River was sprinkled on the earth, so they created the myth of Nüwa to make up for the heavens, pinning on the yearning and worship of the gods. The ancestors were deeply shocked by the god of thunder, and sincerely hoped that a true hero who stood up to the heavens and the earth could control the rainstorm and thunder to protect mankind, and prayed for the protection of the god of thunder in the cognition of nature, so the dragon and snake representing wind, rain, thunder, and electricity were combined with the "human face" representing human will, creating a fuxi art image that combined the "human head" who knew human feelings and the "dragon body" that reached providence, simulating Fuxi as the son of the god of thunder, embodying the super-rational idealistic enthusiasm and the simple and naïve cognitive concept of the unity of heaven and man in addition to the ancestors' fertility worship. This is the emotional self-consciousness corresponding to the fit of human beings and nature. Tianshui cultural scholar Zhong Xiaoyan described in "Types and Cultural Values Under the Stone Ridge" that "the personified salamander pattern is considered to be the prototype of the Fuxi clan with a dragon body and a human head, showing the original appearance of the ancestor god of the Chinese nation."
The stage of emergence of Shilingxia culture in the Wushan area is roughly consistent with the chronology of the transition from matriarchal society to patrilineal society. The appearance of Fuxi at this juncture is not an accident of historical development. His birth greatly contributed to the historical process of civilization. For example, Fuxi "Wang Tianxia, the beginning of the Bagua" ("Zhou Yi Zhi Ci"), improved the mode of production, "knotted rope and woven nets, taught the people to fish and hunt" ("Hanshu Vinaya Zhi" quoted in "Shiben"), "drilled wood for fire" ("History of Xuan" quoted "Hetu Ting Auxiliary"), "made calendars, fixed the festival" ("Zhou Yi Shu Jing"), improved productivity; "took the skin as a ceremony, the betrothed marriage ceremony" ("Supplementary History, Three Emperors Benji"), "made the qinser for pleasure" ("Li Ji Qu Li"), formulated the etiquette of life, abolished the robbery of marriages, and ended tribal strife. The clan tribes living in this area under his leadership began to set foot on another promised land of human civilization. The human-faced salamander pattern faience vase and the human-faced faience clay vase excavated from Fujiamen show the world the ancestors living in the Pangsha River Basin and longchuan River Basin in the tributaries of the Wei River, and worship the ancestors of mankind such as Fuxi Nuwa.
On the afternoon of August 21, 2009, our group was full of expectations to visit the fujiamen site. Although nearly six thousand years have passed, we have found several pieces of red clay and black faience pottery from the grass of the earth and wasteland, one of which belongs to the neck fragment of the pottery, with three parallel lines. According to Mr. Chen Tiangui, a native of the Fu family, his brother once found a red clay clay clay plate with a diameter of about 20 centimeters in the field, and a baby fish was painted on the edge of the plate, which was almost exactly the same as the pattern of "human face salamander faience pottery vase". What is even more surprising is that in 2000, during the construction of the second line of the Baolan Railway, the site of Xichangping was found in Luomen, Wushan, and a large number of pottery pieces of the first phase of the Dadiwan culture were excavated, which is about 7800 to 8300 years ago, which is also the best example of the distribution range of the Dadiwan culture is close to the upper reaches of the WeiHe River, and once again proves that the cultural layers of the prehistoric civilization in Wushan have been inherited from the first phase of Dadiwan, the Banpo type, the Miaodigou type, the Shilingxia type, the Majiayao type, the Qijia type, etc., and have never been blocked. Moreover, the shilingxia type has an important cultural significance of carrying on the upper and lower levels.
In addition to the ruins of Zhoujia Shiling Village, Fujiamen Village and Xiqianping in Wushan, in recent years, some types of faience pottery under Shiling have also been excavated in the southern part of Wushan, such as Tange and Simen. Pottery excavated from the Tange area is mainly distributed in the northern mountains with a relatively warm climate, where water resources were abundant in the past.
On the afternoon of February 24, 2007, Wang Yichang, Yang Jianquan, and Chen Weiping and I were searching for Yaerping in The North Mountain of Tange, and accidentally found a ash pit, which was greatly changed when the horizontal terraces were built in the 1970s, and it was fortunate that the ash pit could be preserved. In the large number of broken clay strips of clay pottery, red pottery and orange pottery in the ash pit, I found a fragment of a red clay and black colored clay pot, one shoulder and ear were intact, the mouth edge had a compound parallel pattern, and the neck was decorated with curved triangle patterns and arc patterns, which were fully in line with the pattern characteristics of the type under the stone ridge such as bird pattern, curved triangle pattern, arc pattern, compound parallel stripe, etc. On April 7, 2013, I and three professors, Xue Shichang, Liu Yanxiang and An Jianjun of Tianshui Normal College, visited the home of Teacher Yang Jianquan of Tange Middle School, who collected a red clay and black faience clay pot excavated in 2000 at the Present Tange Central Primary School (formerly the Lower Temple of Wanhua Temple), with an open mouth, oblique edge, deep abdomen, flat bottom, 11.2 cm high, 12.2 cm caliber, the maximum abdominal circumference of 47 cm, composed of curved triangle patterns and line patterns, the style is very exquisite, and the "Gansu Colored Pottery" edited by the Gansu Provincial Museum (Cultural Relics Publishing House, 1984 edition) The ornamental pattern of "Miaodigou Type Curved Belly Basin" and the ornamental pattern of "Shilingxia Type Tank" are exactly the same, belonging to the Yangshao culture Shilingxia type, dating back to about 5800 years ago.
A comrade surnamed Dai of The Tange Nong Power Station collected two clay clay pots excavated from the village of Zhaizi, Tange Town, one of which was 16 cm high, with a neck height of 4.2 cm and a maximum circumference of the abdomen of 46 cm; a flared mouth, a flat edge, a bundle of necks, and a flat bottom of the drum abdomen; there was a parallel depression of the neck, a parallel dent in the mouth, a parallel recess at the neck and shoulder joint, and three parallel recesses on the abdomen, which were interspersed with the triangular patterns of the strokes. In order to explore the ins and outs of these two pieces of pottery, on the eighth day of the first lunar month in 2006, I and the principal of Songshan Primary School in Tange Town, Ji Zaocun, and I braved the heavy snow of goose feathers to visit the village of Zhaizixia. A large number of scattered pottery pieces, tiles and porcelain pieces were accidentally found on the site of the Northern Song Dynasty Laiyuan Village in the west of the village. One of the pieces of pottery belly, covered with a plain pottery coat and decorated with a diamond-shaped mesh pattern carved out, is a typical type of pottery under the stone ridge.
In addition, the Wushan County Museum has a collection of "bird wing pattern faience vases" collected from Tange in 1987, which also belong to the Shilingxia type. According to a local cultural relics thief, bird wing pattern faience pottery vases were unearthed in a large tomb in Qijiawan, Beishan, Tange in the 1980s. Because of the failure to visit the site, it is difficult to determine the conclusion, and there are doubts. In short, the pottery excavated in the Tange area fully proves that in about six thousand years, There has been a highly mature faience pottery civilization in Tange.
Judging from the current archaeological results, the type of faience pottery under the Stone Ridge is mainly yellow mud and black color, the composition is sparse, and the characteristics of the painting of the temple bottom ditch type are retained, and the ornamentation is multi-parallel line pattern, concentric circle pattern, wavy pattern, arc triangle pattern, bird pattern, frog pattern, etc. Mr. Zhao Guohua's "Culture of Fertility Worship" made a systematic interpretation of the triangle pattern and concentric circle pattern, believing that "it is a direct depiction of the female yin, which mainly shows the vulva of childbearing, and these patterns reflect the fertility cult of the matrilineal clan society with the female yin cult as the main symbol."
The type under the Stone Ridge has been found in the WeiHe, Jing River, and Tao River basins, but in recent years, some people in the academic circles have proposed to cancel the type under the Stone Ridge, and even some people have despised the existence of the type under the Stone Ridge. If the Shilingxia type is abolished, then from the Banpo type, the Miaodigou type to the Majiayao type, an archaeological and cultural fault of about a thousand years will be formed. The denial of the Shilingxia type is an indifferent disregard for the 1,200-square-meter Wushan Fujiamen Majiayao Cultural Site. Wushan should vigorously publicize the ruins of Fujiamen and the culture under the Shiling Mountains, learn from the experience of Lintao, Guanghe, Jishishan and other places in Gansu, and establish a large-scale Fujiamen sculpture of "human-faced salamander pattern pottery vase" in the square of the county town or at the railway station and convention center to enhance the cultural self-confidence of local residents.
Source: New Tianshui Client