Suzhou Tiger Hill Pagoda unearthed five generations of yue kiln secret color porcelain carved lotus petal pattern bowl Li Yun, a reporter of this newspaper
Linfenqu Village, Shanxi - Chema Pit at the Tianma Ruins Li Yun, a reporter for this newspaper, took a photo
The Yangshao culture's human face fish pattern painted pottery pot excavated from the Banpo site Li Yun, a reporter of this newspaper, took a photo
Pole headdresses unearthed in Ordos, Inner Mongolia Li Yun, a reporter of this newspaper, took a photo
Changxin Palace Lamp Unearthed from the Han Tomb in Mancheng, Hebei Province, photographed by Li Yun, a reporter of this newspaper
The 1920s was a seminal decade for Chinese archaeology. In the past ten years, four important archaeological discoveries on the land of China have amazed the world and played the colorful music of "modern Chinese archaeology" with the strength of the earth.
The Yangshao culture, discovered in 1921 in Henan, is the first archaeological cultural name to appear in the history of modern Chinese archaeology, opening up a broad prospect for the study of Chinese prehistoric culture.
In 1926, the excavation of the site of Xiyin Village in Xia County, Shanxi Province, laid the foundation of Chinese archaeology. The excavation of half a manually cut silkworm cocoon specimen provides important physical evidence for the study of the origin of silk.
The archaeology of Yin Ruins, which began in 1928, unearthed a large number of capital city architectural sites and cultural relics represented by oracle bones and bronzes, and established the scientific status of Yin Shang society as a history of faith.
In 1929, a complete "Peking man" skull was found at the Zhoukoudian site. This earth-shattering discovery provides a wealth of convincing evidence for human origins.
Since then, with a series of archaeological excavations such as the Chengziya Site in Shandong, the Baoji Fighting Terrace Site, and the Yuhang Liangzhu Site, modern Chinese archaeology has entered a new era. After the founding of New China, archaeologists have achieved fruitful results in the study of ancient humans to the Ming and Qing dynasties. After several generations of archaeologists continuing to struggle, archaeological discoveries have extended the historical axis, enhanced historical credibility, enriched historical connotations, activated historical scenes, made continuous breakthroughs in archaeological technology, and improved archaeological theories.
For a century, archaeologists have "gone up and down to the Yellow Spring, used their hands and feet to find things", and "built archaeology with Chinese characteristics in Chinese style and Style", and made archaeological work an "important work to display and construct the history of the Chinese nation and the treasures of Chinese civilization".
Clarify the historical context of China's long-standing civilization
Archaeology confirms history, and archaeology brings new knowledge.
China's vast sea of literature and classics record the history of China for more than 3,000 years, and before the invention of the oracle bone, there was a history of civilization development in China for more than 1,000 years and a history of human development of more than one million years. Archaeologists excavate ancient relics buried in the ground, revealing the dusty history and transforming their interpretation and understanding into new historical knowledge.
"The great achievements of China's archaeological discoveries have empirically proved the history of mankind for millions of years, the cultural history of 10,000 years, and the history of civilization for more than 5,000 years." General Secretary Xi Jinping's words were loud and clear.
Millions of years of human origin history and tens of thousands of years of human prehistory and civilization history need to rely on archaeological results to construct. Even the history of civilization with written evidence needs to be referenced, confirmed, enriched and perfected through archaeological work.
"Shang poor bi fell to the Yellow Spring, and used his hands and feet to find something." Behind just 14 words is the unremitting struggle of Chinese archaeologists for a hundred years.
With the gratifying discovery of the Zhoukoudian Peking Man Site, the history of ancient humans in China has been pushed forward by more than half a million years. After the founding of New China, the discoveries and research results of the Yuanmou people pushed forward the time of ancient human existence in China by more than one million years.
After a million years of human history, we enter the Neolithic era of ten thousand years of cultural history.
Banpo ruins, Magnetic Hill ruins, Beishouling ruins, Houli ruins, Xishuipo ruins, Wang Yin Dawenkou cemetery, Xipo ruins, Baligang ruins, Shangshan ruins, Yangguanzhai ruins, etc., through archaeology we found that this period of settlement scale is larger, the layout is more regular, the clan cemetery is developed, the production tools have made great progress, and the daily necessities are more diverse. We can see that the traditional Chinese culture has been conceived during this period.
Around 5,000 years ago, China's Neolithic age entered the end, the development of clan society reached its peak, and civilization has arrived. The ruins of shuanghuashu, shijiahe ruins, liangzhu sites, Pingliangtai ruins, Wangchenggang ruins, etc., are all representatives of this period.
From a distant million years, our ancestors have entered the period of civilization history of more than 5,000 years, step by step, step by step. The excavation of the Erlitou site has made the Xia Dynasty "light and shadow emerge", the excavation of the Yin Ruins in Anyang has labeled the Shang Dynasty as "Yin Shang", and our understanding of the Zhou Dynasty is inseparable from bamboo and bronze, the former is a historical document, the latter can be seen through excavation. After that, generations of princes will rebuke each other, and one by one the erudite Confucians will preach the Tao. With the collision of weapons and the clash of ideas, the land of China eventually became one of the important regions of ancient civilization in the world.
"Diverse, inclusive and continuous". In the archaeology and history of contemporary countries around the world, the only person who can have such a complete and unbroken archaeological genealogy and historical and cultural sequence is China. Compared with the archaeology of other parts of the world and countries, Chinese archaeology has rich prehistoric archaeological remains of millions of years of human history and 10,000 years of cultural history, as well as extremely rich and unique remnants of civilization history. Chinese archaeology, based on such a rich heritage, has amazed and envied the world.
Formed the theoretical system of Chinese archaeology
Between eclecticism and up-and-down exploration, Chinese archaeology has been exploring and enriching its own theories.
The goal of the first generation of Chinese archaeologists was mainly to find the "originality of Chinese culture" and argue for the indigenous origins of Chinese culture. Represented by Fu Sinian, then director of the Institute of History and Linguistics of the Academia Sinica, he believed that the overall pattern of prehistoric culture was the framework of "Yixia East and West".
During this period, the first batch of young Chinese scholars who studied archaeology abroad, including Li Ji, Liang Siyong, and Pei Wenzhong, returned to China one after another, applied the archaeological knowledge they learned abroad to the practice of Chinese archaeology, and began to preside over the excavation of important sites such as Xiyin Village in Xia County, Shanxi, Yin Ruins in Anyang, Henan, and Zhoukoudian in Beijing. The excavation of the Yin Ruins by the Institute of History and Linguistics from 1928 to 1937 was the first archaeological excavation independently organized by the Chinese archaeological research institute. Liang Siyong discovered the bottom-up stratigraphic superposition relationship between Yangshao culture, Longshan culture and Shang culture in Hougang, Anyang, which is also known as the "Hougang Triassic Layer", which solved the problem of whether the remnants of these cultures that had been debated endlessly in the academic circles before were earlier and later.
From 1937 to 1949, after more than a decade of war, the archaeological cause almost came to a standstill.
After the founding of New China, the cause of archaeology was restarted, and the theory was continuously developed and improved with archaeological practice. After 1949, the "Yellow River Basin Central theory" or "Central Plains Centrism" dominated, emphasizing the core role and strong influence of the Yellow River Basin.
In the 1980s, Su Bingqi abandoned the traditional "Central Plains Centrism" and summarized the theory of "faunal types" of prehistoric cultures based on archaeological materials unearthed from all over the country; and from the polycentric and pluralistic patterns of the origin of ancient Chinese civilization, he proposed the "full of stars and buckets" of the origin of Chinese civilization and the "pluralistic integration" model formed by Chinese civilization, as well as the "ancient culture - ancient city - ancient country" theory and "ancient country - Fang country - empire" development model.
Yan Wenming proposed the "heavy petal flower" model in 1987, believing that in the prehistoric cultural pattern, "the most famous is the Central Plains Cultural Area", surrounded by the Ganqing Cultural Area, Shandong Cultural Area, Yanliao Cultural Area, Yangtze River Middle Reaches Cultural Area and Jiangsu and Zhejiang Cultural Area, and there are many other cultural areas in the outermost layer, "The entire Chinese Neolithic culture is like a huge heavy petal flower".
Almost at the same time as the "heavy-petaled flower" model was proposed, Zhang Guangzhi proposed the "Chinese Interaction Circle" model, that is, before 5000 BC, the prehistoric cultures in various parts of China were separated from each other; around 5000 BC, new cultures appeared and old cultures expanded; by about 4000 BC, these cultures were closely linked to each other.
With the steady development of the archaeological cause, since the 1990s, many large-scale archaeological projects have been organized at the national level.
In 1996, the "Xia Shang Zhou Dynasty Project" was launched as a key project of national "Ninth Five-Year Plan" science and technology research. The project combines the research methods of natural sciences, social sciences and humanities with research results, and opens 44 topics on 9 major topics, and 170 experts and scholars from the fields of history, archaeology and philology jointly tackle key problems, and the project was concluded in September 2000.
The "Chinese Civilization Exploration Project" is another major archaeological project after the "Xia-Shang-Zhou Dynasty Project". The project was officially launched in 2004, and the relevant research results of the fourth phase of the project were released in May 2018. The project uses archaeological investigation and excavation as the main means to obtain relevant materials, supplemented by the support of modern science and technology and multidisciplinary interdisciplinary research, and the results achieved are rich and solid.
While the Chinese civilization source exploration project is still continuing, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage has launched a major research project of "Archaeology china". The study mainly focuses on some major archaeological and large-scale site protection projects, and deeply studies the pluralistic integration pattern of early Chinese civilization. Projects such as "Xia Culture Research" and "Hetao Regional Settlement and Social Research" are intended to further dispel the fog of early Chinese civilization.
Throughout the century, Chinese archaeology has gradually formed a Chinese archaeological method system and theoretical system with the "field archaeological excavation" pioneered by Li Ji as the main collection means, Liang Siyong's "archaeological stratigraphy" and Su Bingqi's "archaeological typology" as the basic analysis methods, and Xia Nai's "archaeological culture naming theory" and Su Bingqi's "faunal type theory" and "civilization path theory" as important guiding ideas.
From geological stratigraphy to archaeological stratigraphy, from taxonomy to archaeological typology, Chinese archaeology has explored a disciplinary approach that is completely its own in practice. The theory of archaeology with Chinese characteristics, with the academic thought of Scholars such as Li Ji, Liang Siyong, Xia Nai, and Su Bingqi as the core, has also been tested by archaeological practice itself in the process of guiding the practice of Chinese archaeology.
Show China's open and inclusive great power style
Liangzhu and Quanzhou have successfully applied for heritage in 2019 and this year, and the two are like people's "inside" and "outside", perfectly interpreting the word "style".
The Chinese style is "inside", which is manifested as cultural self-confidence. General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out: "China has firm road confidence, theoretical self-confidence, institutional self-confidence, and its essence is cultural self-confidence based on the inheritance of more than 5,000 years of civilization. ”
On July 6, 2019, Liangzhu Ancient City successfully applied for heritage, which is not only the best result of more than 80 years of research and exploration of Liangzhu culture by generations of scholars, but also an extension of the criteria for defining civilization - the ruins of Liangzhu Ancient City show people the form of an early state based on rice farming, but whether it can be attributed to "civilization" has been debated before.
The Chinese Civilization Exploration Project inspected the Liangzhu Ruins in Yuhang, Zhejiang, Xiangfen Tao Temple in Shanxi, Shenmu Shi'a in Shaanxi, and Yanshi Erlitou in Henan, and carried out large-scale archaeological surveys and excavations of more than ten regional settlements across the country. The research team extracted and summarized the four major characteristics of civilization: the basis for the development of agriculture and handicrafts, the obvious differentiation of social classes, members of society, and classes, the emergence of central cities, and the construction of large buildings. This is different from the standards that have always been adopted in Western academia. The three elements of civilization commonly used in Western academia are cities, writing, and metallurgical technology. As an "individual case", the ruins of Liangzhu Ancient City have changed the inherent evaluation standards with the scale of its ancient city, the superb jade craftsmanship and the huge scale of public works, and has been recognized internationally.
More importantly, the ruins of Liangzhu Ancient City have advanced the emergence of Chinese civilization to more than 5,000 years ago, extending the history of Chinese civilization forward by more than a thousand years; and arguing that "five thousand years of Chinese civilization" has been a credible history from legend and claim.
Over the past 80 years, generations have gone forward to explore the past of Liangzhu together; for 5,000 years, the of Liangzhu have stood silently, witnessing the glory and change of civilization.
China's style is "outside", which is manifested in openness, inclusiveness, harmony and coexistence since ancient times. General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized: "For a long time, the Chinese civilization and other civilizations in the world have exchanged ideas and learned from each other, contributed to the world a profound ideological system, rich achievements in science and technology culture and art, and unique system creation, and profoundly affected the process of world civilization." ”
On July 26 this year, "Quanzhou: The World Maritime Trade Center of Song and Yuan China" was inscribed on the World Heritage List. Quanzhou was once an important town of marine trade in the world, one of the starting points of the Maritime Silk Road, and a model for cultural exchange and integration. The Islamic Holy Sepulchre is the oldest and most intact Islamic relics in China, The Qingjing Temple is one of the oldest surviving Islamic temples in China, the Cao'an Mani Guang Buddha statue is the only preserved manichaean master stone carving in the world, and the Zhenwu Temple, Tianhou Temple, Kaiyuan Temple, Confucian Temple, Laojunyan Statue, etc. that coexist in one city belong to the historical sites of Confucianism, Taoism and "Sinicized" Buddhism in China. This cultural heritage, which represents different religious civilizations and exudes different artistic charms, is a historical witness to the harmonious coexistence and mutual integration of diverse cultures in ancient Quanzhou.
China's ancient agricultural technology, the "four great inventions" and lacquerware, silk, porcelain, pig iron and steel technology, etc., have made outstanding contributions to the progress of human civilization, and the religions (such as Indian Buddhism and Islam) and crops (such as corn, potatoes, peppers) introduced to China by the Silk Road have also changed the living and eating habits of Chinese. The world has always been a "community of destiny" in which you have me and I have you.
There are troughs and peaks in Chinese history, but no matter when, China is China, Chinese is Chinese cultural identity is inseparable from historical identity, and it is the continuous development of archaeology that makes us have more understanding of the common ancestors. Chinese archaeology today undertakes the mission of consciously constructing the civilization consciousness of the Chinese nation, which is of key significance to Chinese history and to the cultural identity of "who we are".
In addition, the formation of a "sense of community" among various ethnic groups in China based on cultural identity is inseparable from the correct understanding of the history of the mutual integration of various ethnic groups. Archaeological discoveries and historical documents corroborate, complement and enrich this historical understanding. Since the pre-Qin Dynasty, the exchanges, exchanges and blending between ethnic groups have never been one-way, among which there are both the active absorption of Han culture by ethnic minorities and the absorption of minority culture by a large number of Examples of Han Culture, reflecting the historical contribution of various ethnic groups to the joint construction of the Chinese civilization system. "Hu Han mixed together, and eventually became a family." At all levels of spiritual and material culture, such as the ritual music system, daily utensils, clothing and clothing, language and culture, archaeology has objectively and informatively displayed the historical evidence and historical trajectory of the interaction, mutual influence and integration between various ethnic groups with incomparably rich materials.
(Reporters Huang Xiaoyi and Li Yun)
Source: Guangming Daily