Dai Xiangming (National Museum of China)
Photographs of excavations in Yangshao Village, Shichi, Henan, in 1921
Century-old Chinese archaeology began with excavations at the Yangshao site. Yangshao culture is the first archaeological culture named in the history of Chinese archaeology, and the prehistoric archaeology of China that was thus opened has also gone through a hundred years of history. A brief review of the history of Yangshao cultural discovery and research can reflect the changes in Chinese archaeology, especially Neolithic archaeology, in terms of research orientation, research content, methods and concepts in different periods.
One
In 1921, the Swedish geologist Anderson, hired by the Beiyang government, presided over the excavation of the ruins of Yangshao Village in Shichi, Henan, and later proposed the naming of Yangshao culture, which was later regarded as the beginning of Chinese archaeology. The excavation of the Yangshao site not only opened up Chinese archaeology, but also proved to the world that China had a developed prehistoric culture. However, Ahn was only a geologist with a strong interest in archaeology, and he did not have systematic archaeological knowledge, so the excavations at that time could not reflect archaeological stratigraphy, and it was impossible to adopt the method of archaeological typology in subsequent collation and analysis. Influenced by the popular Chinese culture of The West, Anderson proposed the Yangshao culture of the West, and he soon went to Gansu to excavate sites such as Majiayao, Banshan, Machang and Qijia, also to prove that Chinese faience pottery spread from the West. Anderson's limitations are directly related to his professional background and the background of the times. However, his pioneering work was still positive, and he introduced archaeology from the West into China through practice, making it an emerging discipline that was completely different from ancient Chinese epigraphy. This new discipline is also in line with the ideological trend of the "May Fourth" new cultural movement, and since its birth, it has undertaken the mission of reconstructing China's ancient history. In the tide of great changes in the times, many young Chinese students went overseas to study archaeology in Western countries such as britain and the United States, and returned to China one after another from the late 1920s, becoming the forerunners and pioneers of Chinese archaeology.
Among the few people in this group, the first thing to mention is Mr. Li Ji, who is known as the father of Chinese archaeology. In 1926, Li Ji, who returned to China after completing his studies, presided over the excavation of the ruins of Xiyin Village in Xia County, Shanxi. Choosing this place to excavate, in addition to the constraints of some specific social conditions at that time, another very important reason is probably that there is the same faience pottery as the Yangshao site here, and Li Ji wants to dig out and personally study the Prehistoric Culture of China represented by the Faience Pottery himself and trace its ins and outs. As a scholar with a sense of family and country who is determined to find the source of Chinese culture and the Chinese nation, it is clear that he, like many scholars of his generation, is full of doubts about Chinese culture and strives to make a breakthrough. But Li Ji studied anthropology in the United States and seems to have no special training in field archaeology, so he also did not master scientific archaeological stratigraphy and typology.
Archaeologist Li Ji
Excavation site of Xiyin Village site
The development and maturity of stratigraphy (also known as stratigraphy) and typology (also known as standardography), which are regarded as the two wheels of Chinese archaeology, was completed by two other archaeologists by the 1930s and 1940s. The symbol of the maturity of stratigraphy is that Liang Siyong excavated the "Hougang Triassic", and Mr. Liang went to the United States to study archaeology and anthropology at Harvard University, and should have a better archaeological foundation and theoretical literacy. The maturity of typology began with Su Bingqi's study of the Baoji Cockfighting Platform "Waji", although at that time there was a translation of the Swedish scholar Montelius's "Methodology of Prehistory Archaeology" to China, but Mr. Su seems to have established a set of typological methods entirely by his own exploration. In this way, soon after the birth of Chinese archaeology, Chinese scholars mastered the two major methods relied on by archaeology in practice, and made them suitable for local excavation and data collation and analysis, laying a solid foundation for the great development of the discipline after the war.
Before the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War in 1937, the influential and large-scale archaeological activities in China were mainly completed by the Institute of History and Language of the Academia Sinica and the Beiping Research Institute, followed by the excavation of the Paleolithic ruins of Zhoukoudian in Beijing by the Geological Survey. From the perspective of talent training, team building and accumulation of a set of field excavation methods and techniques, the excavation and research of the Academia Sinica in Yin Ruins for ten years is the most effective, so the archaeology of Yin Ruins at that time is regarded as the cradle of Chinese archaeology and is worthy of the name. Another important work in the 1930s was the excavation of the Chengziya site in Longshan Town, Zhangqiu, Shandong Province, which confirmed the Longshan culture and led to discussions among scholars such as Liang Siyong and Yin Da (Liu Yao) about the chronological and cultural relations between Yangshao and Longshan. It is also worth mentioning that in the 1940s, Mr. Xia Nai revised the chronological relationship between Yangshao (Majiayao culture) and Qijia culture through fieldwork in Gansu.
Group photo of the staff of the first excavation of the Chengziya site
A group photo of all the staff of the first excavation of Yin Ruins
From the beginning of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression until the founding of New China, it was disturbed by years of war and chaos, and for more than 10 years there was a lack of large-scale systematic archaeological work. Therefore, in the first 30 years after the birth of Chinese archaeology, important discoveries and research on Yangshao culture were mainly limited to a few sites such as Yangshao and Xiyin Village. During this period, it is worth noting that according to Mr. Yan Wenming's understanding, the excavation and research of Yin Ruins has embodied the concept of settlement archaeology, and began to devote himself to the exploration of the origin of Chinese civilization. This makes Chinese archaeology have a high starting point in the early stages of its formation.
Two
After the founding of New China, archaeology soon ushered in an era of vigorous development, and important discoveries and important work of Yangshao culture also followed. In the 1950s, with the re-establishment of institutions and the construction of the team, many archaeological surveys were done and some important sites were excavated. In terms of Yangshao culture, the first and most worth mentioning is the excavation and research of the Banpo site in Xi'an. At that time, under the influence of the Soviet Union, in order to explore the social development of the clan, a large-scale disclosure of the Banpo site was carried out, and from the current point of view, it can also be said that it is the earliest settlement archaeological practice in Neolithic archaeology. However, limited to the level of excavation and understanding at that time, there were many mistakes from excavation to the collation and analysis of data, especially the basis of chronology was not sorted out. Since then, the excavation of the Miaodigou site has been greatly improved, but the report of materials is still very brief. The excavation of these two sites established the Banpo type and the Miaodigou type of the Yangshao culture, and since then, the staging of the two sites, the staging of the types and the chronological relationship between the two sites have become the forefront of Neolithic archaeological discussion for a long time. In addition, it should be noted that important discoveries in this period are the Yangshao Cemetery of Yuanjun Temple in HuaXian County, Shaanxi Province, excavated in the late 1950s, and the excavation and research report that was finally completed by Mr. Zhang Zhongpei set a model for studying the social organization structure through cemetery analysis.
By the 1960s, with the increasing number of excavations at the site, issues related to the yangshao culture type and periodization were widely discussed. Archaeological work came to a standstill during the Cultural Revolution and gradually resumed after the 1970s, the most important of which was the near-complete disclosure of the Jiangzhai site in Lintong, Shaanxi, which once again demonstrated the tradition of Chinese archaeology from the early days to comprehensively study ancient societies through large-scale settlement archaeology in an era when the main content was to explore cultural types, periodizations and chronological relations. In addition, another area of research worthy of attention in the 1960s and 1970s was to explore the social system around some tomb materials of the Yangshao and Dawenkou cultures that had been discovered, especially the issues of matrilineal and patriarchal, but under the influence of the political climate at that time, most of the discussions in this regard had the dogmatic tendency of "discussing history with arguments"; on the other hand, it also showed that Marxist archaeology had a lasting concern about social issues, and it was based on this that there would be large-scale excavations of the Yangshao settlement in Jiangzhai. Recently, Mr. Zhang Chi wrote an article pointing out that Chinese archaeology has had two research orientations of "cultural history" and "social history" from the very beginning, which can be described as pertinent.
The ring trench settlement of Jiangzhai
However, in any case, whether it is constrained by limited materials, or archaeology naturally needs to have a perfect space-time framework, or the stage of overall academic cognition, from the 1950s to the 1980s, the most important work of Chinese Neolithic archaeology is still to continuously obtain new discoveries and new materials, and constantly improve the spatio-temporal structure and genealogical relationship of archaeological culture, and most people are still mainly committed to the reconstruction of "cultural history". Because of this, from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, on the basis of summarizing the above work results, Mr. Su Bingqi gradually formed and improved his fauna type theory, and became the guiding ideology and main research content of Chinese Neolithic archaeology for a long period of time to come.
The 1980s, after the end of the Cultural Revolution, was an era of ideological emancipation, mixed and collided various ideological trends, and new ideas and old traditions intertwined and paralleled. Reflected in Chinese archaeology, especially Neolithic archaeology, the following points are outstanding: First, the extensive practice under the guidance of the above-mentioned fauna type ideology, the main cultural regions and their cultural development sequences have been initially established and gradually improved. Second, represented by Mr. Yan Wenming's research on the early settlement of Yangshao in Jiangzhai and the subsequent study of Yangshao settlements and cemeteries, the archaeology of Chinese settlements has been elevated to a peak, and it is no less than any actual settlement archaeological research case in the world, and has created a classic paradigm for the study of settlements and social archaeology in China since then. Third, the new trend of process and post-process archaeology imported from the United States and Europe had a strong impact on the Chinese archaeological community, especially the young scholars at that time, and this influence lasted until the 1990s. Due to space limitations, we will not discuss it here.
Three
By the 1990s, China's Neolithic archaeology began to show some new changes, the most eye-catching is the quiet rise of settlement archaeological concepts and practices, more and more scholars began to engage in research in this area. Since then, settlement archaeology has not only summarized the experience and path of the locality, but also some new concepts and new methods imported from abroad, including Mr. Zhang Guangzhi's lectures and subsequent published works, as well as the introduction of western regional systematic investigation and the influence of Chinese and foreign scholars in this regard.
Yangshao Cultural Museum
From Banpo to Jiangzhai, as well as cemeteries such as Yuanjun Temple, Beishouling, Hengjing, and Shijia, all of which are concentrated in the Banpo type of Guanzhong in Shaanxi, these important discoveries provide near-perfect information for the study of early settlements and societies in Yangshao, and their academic value has also been interpreted by some outstanding scholars at the right time, making the classics of early Chinese settlement and social archaeology research. Excavations at the Qin'an Dadiwan site in Gansu in the late 1970s and early 1980s demonstrated the amazing settlement connotation and development level of the late Yangshao period, thus making people aware of the changes in the social structure from the early to the late Yangshao period. However, at that time, information about the mid-Yangshao settlement was still relatively lacking. This deficiency has been compensated for since the end of the 1990s to the beginning of this century, first of all thanks to the archaeological survey and excavation of the Xipo site in Lingbao, Henan, the archaeological survey carried out by Sino-foreign cooperation in the Yiluo Basin, and the regional systematic survey we carried out in the Yuncheng Basin of Southern Jinnan, all of which were achieved by practicing the concept and method of settlement archaeology. The recent revelation of large ring trench settlements such as Gongyi Shuanghuashu has filled in important new data for the study of the social development of the late Yangshao period in the hinterland of the Central Plains. With these successive new archaeological discoveries and the efforts of several generations of scholars, the academic community's understanding of Yangshao culture and its social evolution has become increasingly enriched and enriched.
Cast Dingyuan landform
Lingbao West Slope Ruins F104 (Top) and F105 (Bottom)
Gongyi double locust tree site
Chinese archaeology has made remarkable achievements in the development of the past hundred years, this seemingly unpopular, niche discipline, but in all periods have attracted some first-class brains into it, so that it has shown a high standard at all stages, unique in the Chinese discipline, long-lasting prosperity. The implications are thought-provoking. On the occasion of the centenary of Chinese archaeology, we recall the unremitting exploration of the blue wisps of the past generations of scholars, and also look forward to the further glory of the next day.
This article is reproduced from the World of Cultural Relics, Issue 2, 2021