Excavation of Neolithic village ruins in Banpo Village, Xi'an
Science Bulletin, 1955.07 Xi'an Task Force, Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Shi Xingbang)
The Neolithic cultural site of Banpo Village is located on a river valley terrace about 800 meters on the east bank of the Dahe River. This is a well-developed Neolithic village site, and its range is about 200 meters from north to south and about 100 meters from east to west. In the winter of 1962, the Northwest Cultural Relics Team discovered the site. In the autumn of 1954, the third training course for archaeologists selected this place as a place for the excavation of the site, and after the training course, the Xi'an team of the Institute of Archaeology continued to excavate. It was not until December 17 of the same year that the work was completed.
The scope of this excavation, which is only about 650 square meters, is only part of this village. In this excavation work, more comprehensive attention was paid to the disclosure of residential relics or the exploration of cultural relics, so that the addresses and objects left behind by people's sudden lives at that time could be displayed more comprehensively and correctly.
Within the scope of our excavations, there are Han Dynasty cultural layers above the Neolithic remains, most of which are distributed in the northeast, and the thickest layers are up to 1.4 meters deep. Excavations include large jomon tiles, round tiles, pottery embroidery, pottery pots, half two mirrors, etc., and also mixed with many pottery pieces, stone tools and bone tools of the Yangshao cultural system.
The Neolithic cultural calendar is the main cultural accumulation calendar of the Shengpo Village site, its thickness and calendar are not the same in each part, and in the well-preserved west near the cliff, it is up to 3 meters thick. Although there are four different accumulations in succession, but by the excavation artifacts and living ruins, can be divided into two periods, morning and evening, which can be detected within the scope of our excavations, the early building of wooden houses is the main building, and the late period is mostly the use of mud to build houses. In each lip, we find the specific architectural remains of the people of that time, the cellars where Confucian things are hidden, and the daily necessities of H. Now there is a representative main part, which is described:
A residential building
In Banpo Village, neolithic people's dwellings, we find two kinds of rectangular and circular:
The rectangular house (Figures 1 and 2) is the late residence of the people here at that time, only one was found, the preservation is not complete, four have been destroyed, and the remaining parts are 12.6 meters wide from north to south and only 10 meters long from east to west. There are remnants of the wall foundation on the east, north and south sides, and the northeast and southeast corners are better preserved. The bending angle of the wall base is curved, 0.5 meters high and about 1 meter wide, with wooden columns to support the roof. The walls are grayish-white, hard-burned noodles, and inside they are hard and purple-colored grassy dirt. There are more than 30 column holes above the base of the wall, with the most on the northeast and southeast corners. There are more than 10 pillar holes attached to the inner wall of Shengji, and these column holes, with a smaller caliber, average about 0.2 meters. In the middle of the house, there are two hard "pillars" made of braised earth, 4.5 meters from north to south, 4 meters from the south side to the east, and one on the right carbonized remnants of the column, with a diameter of 0.45 meters. Judging from its size and location, there was also a "column circle" at the beginning, which was later destroyed by the Tang Tomb. This large pillar hole is 1.6 meters deep, made entirely of hard braised clay above the living surface, and inserted into the original ground in the lower part. The living surface is a bright and hard gray surface, and when it is first exposed, the perimeter gate above the living surface is tightly cut into the four walls, and the red-burned earth blocks that are very rural are piled up. Some soil blocks, some in the form of irregular blocks, and some with a certain shape of fragments, are likely to be left behind after the damage of buildings such as partitions and stoves in the house. The middle was destroyed by a rather large Tang tomb. According to the results of the inspection, it is preliminarily recognized that this house may be a rectangular house with east and west lengths. As for how long it is, it is difficult to determine, from the results of the western land purchase survey to speculate, may be about 20 meters.
Round house, two were found, the first round house (Fig. 4) is the most intact, the roof E collapsed, piled up on the dwelling (k-surface. In terms of layering, it is also a late appendage... Kind of dwellings. The core is slightly rounded and has a diameter of about 5 meters. With the residual standing of the attachment, the average degree of the hip is 0.22 meters, and the southwest part of the well-preserved place is 0.38 meters. The inner wall is a hard and light gray surface, the outer cut ash soil, the thickness is uneven, from 0.05-0.1 meters. Short wooden columns of rectangular or semi-circular shapes are erected outside the perimeter wall as skeletons to support the weight of the roof. In the middle there is a dagger-shaped pit with six symmetrical column holes on both sides, and the walls of the partition wall are sandwiched with rectangular, triangular or polygonal small wooden columns as a skeleton. The distance between the two partition walls is 0.7 meters, and the living surface here is higher than the rest of the house, and slopes up from the southern border, like an aisle for entering and exiting the portal. From the process of collapsing the roof, it should be observed that the roof is roughly a cone, arranged with wooden rafters below, coated with one or more layers of hard red-burning grass soil, between 0.05-0.1 meters thick, and the diameter of the rafters is average 0.1 meters. Based on the excavated materials, we were able to restore the original shape of the house.
In addition to the two specific houses mentioned above, more than 200 pillar holes were found in the early cultural layers. These pillar holes, of course, are the remains of the flower sites of wooden houses. Some of them are in a straight line, and some are enclosed in an arc, so it can be inferred that it is a round or square house, but many cannot find the structural connection between them, because these column holes have been broken by excavation, and some only traces of the bottom are left. The above column holes can be divided into two categories, the first type is a column hole with a mud mound, which is characterized by a circle of hard and pure white earth around the column hole, and the surrounding gray soil is very clear, and its function is the same as our pillar foundation today. The second technique is a pillar hole without mud circles, and the surface is relatively hard, and the wooden marks left by some cave walls are still obvious.
Every house has one or more stove pits or fires. The most common pit is dagger-shaped, with a hard gray surface of indigo gray on the surface, surrounded and bottomed by a fairly thick layer of pure and fine braised clay. The stove is just a piece of red-hot ash noodles, which often have more than one layer, each layer is different in thickness, and it is as hard as stone.
Next to or near the Neolithic people's houses in Banpo Village, there are one or more cellars for storing things, a total of 22 have been found, which can be divided into two different shapes: the first is a circular bag-shaped pit, with two decadents of different sizes, both with round mouths and large bottoms. Small pocket pits are early, with an average diameter of about 1 meter at the bottom of the pit and an average depth of less than 1 meter. Large bag-shaped pits, often twice as large as the former, are remnants of later periods in which pottery pieces, pottery, bone tools, and stone tools are produced. The second is a rounded rectangular pit, only one has been excavated, the mouth of the pit is a long strip, the bottom edge of the pit is a circular arc rather than a right angle, and it is also an early remain, which contains few pottery pieces and more animal bones.
In addition, in the early cultural layer, the remains of the circle enclosed by thin wooden columns have also been found, and this circle, which we tentatively call the "circle column two no. 1 fence, is almost perfectly circular (Figure 3) with a diameter of 6 meters. In the same cultural layer, about 6 meters northeast of the No. 1 circle, the second circle was found, slightly semicircular, and the shape did not have the rules of the former. The function of these two circles, which we are not yet entirely sure of, is examined from the remains we can obtain: (1) there is no trace of a stove inside the circle, (2) some of the wooden columns are too thin to support the weight of the house, (3) there are no traces of burning earth walls or mud on the fence3 So we speculate that it may have been used as a pen for captive livestock.
2. Burial customs
The site of this excavation, which happened to be in the residential area of the people at that time, did not find their official tombs, and only three coffins of buried children were extracted in the ash layer under the living surface, one of which still preserves skull fragments and teeth. This kind of coffin is buried in a small pit, the urn coffin is a large mouth and small flat bottom sand coarse pottery urn, covered with a considerable fine clay red clay spider, the bottom is pierced with a small hole, and then covered with a small clay red clay bowl, one of which is also coated with a thin layer of red pigment. This burial method adds new information to our study of the burial customs of the people at that time.
3. Production tools and daily necessities
In the houses left behind by the Neolithic people in Banpo Village, in the cellars and in the garbage heaps, we found production tools and daily necessities that were very much in use at that time, including stone tools, pottery, bone tools and other ornaments.
There are more than 200 stone tools, mainly polished tools, and stone tools also account for a considerable proportion. In terms of categories, there are axes, hammers, chisels, hammers, pestles, iron, baskets, balls, and millstones. The most common in the stone axe is a kind of flat round blade with shoulders, an oval shape that grows in a cross-section. Most of the stone scales are small, and the stone scales are not found much, mainly wide and short, and there are two kinds of beating and grinding. The stone ball cornerstone is one of the more distinctive, not only in large quantities, but also smooth and regular grinding. It is about 1.5-6 cm in diameter and is likely to be a pill thing.
The largest number of pottery found gives us a better understanding of the pottery of this cultural system of the Neolithic era developed in Shaanxi. Containers account for the largest proportion of pottery, regardless of their pottery, shape, color and ornamentation are very complex. As far as pottery is concerned, there are three types of coarse sand pottery, fine clay pottery and fine sand hard pottery, and there are more than 20 different types of shapes, the main ones are bowls, pots, cups, bowls, dishes and pointed bottom utensils. Ding is particularly rare, and it is necessary to pay attention. In terms of ornamentation, the most common is the jomon pattern, which is mostly decorated on the appearance of the utensils, the line pattern is mostly decorated on the outside of the fine hard pottery, the string pattern is generally decorated on the neck and shoulder part of the jar, and the blue pattern and braided stripe are only found at the bottom of the round bottom bowl; additional convex decoration is also very common, especially on sand-filled stoneware; and is pulled into a variety of different shapes. In addition, there are cone thorns, which is a more special kind of ornamentation. There are two gods, triangular and circular, both decorated on the neck and shoulder part of fine clay pottery, which is characterized by a very regular cone thorn. All these utensils are handmade, and some of them still obviously have traces of the wire method, but among the late monks, some of the mouths are said to belong to the most prominent fine clay faience pottery of this cultural system with slow wheel trimming, and although the number found is small, its ornamentation is quite complex, and the most ornamented on pots, bowls and large-mouth circular bottoms is the most common, with grain leaf patterns and geometric patterns being the most common. Artifacts with these ornaments are found more often in the late cultural layer. The most special is the ornamentation of living creatures, such as human heads, fish shapes, and plant branches and leaves, especially human head shapes, which are very pressing (Fig. 6). In addition, there are concentric circle patterns, fence patterns, etc. Only a few fragments of flat-bottomed bowls were found in the white-clothed faience pottery, but it is a very important clue to the relationship between the cultures of Shaanxi and Henan. There is a point that special attention is paid to, and where the color is on the side of the silk mouth at the bottom of the large mouth, there are often very regular symbols engraved. This inscription is different from the symbol painted on the burial pottery of the Mid-Levels Horse Factory, it is carved after the utensils have been burned or used for a considerable period, so it is representative of a certain significance.
Secondly, regarding the problem of people using the lid at that time, the use of the lid was found in the relics of the Longshan culture, and there are two kinds of lids of the Banpo Village culture that we have found this time: the first is to use utensils as a cover, and the cover is on other utensils, which belongs to the most of this kind of emotion. The second is a specially made lid, which has a handle on it, shaped like a circle foot, and has two kinds of transparent bottom and non-bottom.
In addition, there are rings, files, spinning wheels, knives and other types of pottery, of which the number of pottery rings is the largest.
More than 300 bone artifacts were found, including needles, cones, hooks, knives, hammers, daggers, fish hooks and other different types. Bone needles are splashed with 4 complete, small tips with holes, and they are very delicately made. There are also many bone cones, and they are mostly sharpened with natural bone pieces and bone joints. There is not much bone hammering, but the type is very complex, with different types such as third floor type, round head type, and triangular flat type. In addition, the special bone organs of The Qiyili are similar to the bone vessels, with one end being rounded at the tip and the other end being flattened. This bone artifact has been unearthed quite a bit and may be a commonly used tool. The more complete piece found in the bone knife foot, with a smooth and bladeless surface, is likely to be a tool for repairing forbidden pottery.
We did not find - pieces of mussels, but found many broken mussel pieces and city ornaments made of these shrimp pieces, mostly in the shape of discs or rings, and some of them also had small holes drilled.
In addition to the ruins described above, what He de particularly mentioned was that in a small earth pit under the original ground, a small mouth and a large flat bottom of sand-filled coarse pottery male were found, and a sand-filled coarse-gray pottery dish was found on it. The jar contained grain grains that had become empty shells, and the Shenhe North Agricultural College identified them as millets (Figure 5). One of the discoveries is that it provides us with very valuable material for studying the situation of agricultural production activities at that time.
IV. Epilogue - Culture and its associated issues
From the above description, we can see that the rich harvest of the excavation of the Neolithic cultural site in Fpo Village provides us with information on the content of the main cultural system of the Neolithic period of the Country and its related issues. In terms of the inclusion of cultural relics, this excavation has enriched the content of the developed Neolithic culture in Weishuiliu City in Shaanxi Province, so that we have a comprehensive and systematic understanding of the relics and residential relics of this culture in this area, and at the same time, it is of great significance for us to investigate the relationship between the same cultural system in Henan, Shansi, and Gansu. Secondly, according to the architectural remains of the Buju I seal spoon and its associated living utensils and production fixtures, R We can depict the actual life activities of people at that time 1; They lived on the terraces of the river valley, lived a settled K village community life, engaged in agricultural production activities, and the livestock breeding and the relatively qualitative Shimao gathering and hunting economy also had a certain component. At that time, stone tools were used as the main tools of labor, and all kinds of pottery were made to cook food or store things, and the large rectangular house was the common residence of the clan members. From these signs and the unified law of human historical development in the primitive era, it can be inferred that the people of the Cultural Era of Banpo Village have already lived a social life of a fairly developed primitive clan system of common labor.