Cao Bingwu
This year marks the centenary of the discovery and naming of the Yangshao culture in Chinese archaeology and Yangshao culture. Over the past hundred years, successive masters of Chinese archaeology, including Xia Nai, Liang Siyong, Su Bingqi, etc., have devoted a lot of attention and energy to Yangshao culture and related issues.
From 1980 to the autumn of 2020, cultural relics and archaeologists have excavated at the Yangshao site many times, hoping to deepen the understanding of Yangshao culture on the occasion of the birth of Chinese archaeology and the 100th anniversary of the discovery and naming of Yangshao culture - this excavation and discovery is not only to re-understand the Yangshao site, but also to look back at the original intention of Chinese archaeology, and to calibrate the Yangshao culture and the source of the Chinese nation and Chinese civilization. "The Paper, Ancient Art" (www.thepaper.cn) will successively present a series of manuscripts entitled "A Hundred Years of Chinese Archaeology".
Overlooking the ruins of Yangshao Village
One hundred years ago, in the autumn of 1921, the Swede Johan Gunnar Andersson (1874-1960) as a mining adviser to the Beiyang government at that time and Chinese scholars conducted the first excavation of the Yangshao site, found a large number of prehistoric relics such as faience pottery and named the Yangshao culture, which is considered to be the beginning of modern Chinese archaeology marked by field excavations.
Anderson the Swede (1874-1960)
In the summer of 1951, shortly after the founding of New China, the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences was led by the famous archaeologist Mr. Xia Nai, that is, the second excavation of the Yangshao site, in addition to the painted pottery and other relics of the Yangshao period, it also identified the polished black pottery and checkered gray pottery of the Longshan period, basically clarifying the cultural nature and appearance of the Yangshao site.
In 1935, Mr. Xia Ding was in Anyang
From the autumn of 1980 to the spring of 1981, the Henan Institute of Archaeology and the Cultural Center of Shichi County jointly excavated the Yangshao site for the third time, which further clarified the connotation of the Yangshao site, confirmed that the site contained two archaeological cultures of Yangshao and Longshan, and clarified its stratigraphic superimposed relationship.
In the autumn of 2020, the Henan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, together with the Sanmenxia Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and other units, excavated for the fourth time, hoping to deepen the understanding of Yangshao culture on the occasion of the birth of Chinese archaeology and the 100th anniversary of the naming of Yangshao culture discovery.
In fact, this excavation and discovery is not only to re-understand the Yangshao site, but also to look back at the original intention of Chinese archaeology, and to calibrate the Yangshao culture and the source of the Chinese nation and Chinese civilization again and again. Every excavation is a memorial that cannot be forgotten, commemorating both history and the discovery and understanding of history.
Anderson discovered that Yangshao had both contingency and inevitability. He is a world-famous geologist, once served as the president of the World Geological Society, then served as a mining consultant hired by the Beiyang government of China, but in the process of prospecting, he also found some clues to paleontological fossils, he was more aware of European paleontology, prehistoric archaeology and its significance at that time, so he was also ready to do some archaeology in China. He first set his sights on Zhoukoudian in the western suburbs of Beijing, where the keels were found, and he intuitively thought that he could find fossils of ancient humans, but because of fortuitous factors, he turned his attention to the Yuanqu and Shichi in the middle reaches of the Yellow River, and traced the ruins of Yangshao Village. He may have discovered the Beijing people's home, but unexpectedly excavated the roots of farming in China, and got a big problem -- the prehistoric source of the Chinese nation and Chinese civilization.
The modern Yangshao Village, which was also an ancient village in the Neolithic Age thousands of years ago, is large in scale, thick in accumulation, rich in remains, and the faience pottery is developed and exquisite, and its connotation and scale have left an extremely deep impression on Anderson, and believe that it is obviously related to the early history of the Chinese nation and civilization. As a result, Anderson expended a great deal of energy to trace its origins. Anderson is a scholar with a world vision, after the discovery of the Yangshao site, he turned his main energy to archaeology, comparing yangshao's faience pottery culture with the famous faience pottery culture known at that time such as Anno faience in Turkmenistan in Central Asia, and Tribole faience in Ukraine, and went to the Ganqing region to find the correlation between the two, and successively published "Ancient Chinese Culture" (1923), "Gansu Archaeology" (1925), "Children of the Loess" (1934) and other works, proposing faience pottery and Chinese civilization.
Yangshao culture, fish-patterned faience pots, collection of the National Museum
Yangshao culture Ship-shaped faience pot Collection of the National Museum
Western scholars before Anderson based on the monism of human culture, most of them speculated that Chinese civilization is a product of Xilai, and Anderson's Western is based on archaeological discoveries and research initiatives, so the impact is quite large, until after the liberation of the former Soviet Union, some authoritative scholars of Big Brother still adhere to the Western view of Chinese culture, there may not be malicious here, but how to correctly understand the Yangshao culture and the source of the Chinese nation and Chinese civilization has become a big problem that has been entangled in Chinese academia, especially in the archaeological community, for a long time. Generations of scholars have not only rediscovered Yangshao Village, but also continuously promoted the study of the formation, development, evolution and genealogy of Yangshao culture and other prehistoric cultures. Among them, Yangshao culture has always been a key hub, not only because it was discovered early, the work was carried out a lot, and there are previous academic origins, but also because Yangshao culture did occupy a unique position in the genealogy of early cultural sources.
Yangshao Culture Eagle-shaped Tao Ding National Museum Collection
Anderson opened the head of field archaeology, and China's advanced scholars followed suit. Because at the beginning of the 20th century, China's traditional view of ancient history for thousands of years encountered a strong impact of the skeptical school under the trend of scientific thought, especially the history of ancient China was considered by many people to be a layer of artificial fabrications. Some scholars influenced by the Western Tide have gone out into the fields to ghostwrite with hoes, looking for new sources, trying to reconstruct early Chinese history with archaeological discoveries. When Mr. Fu Sinian established the Institute of History and Language at the Academia Sinica, the earliest national archaeological institution, he clearly proposed to "go up to the poor and fall into the Yellow Spring, and use his hands and feet to find things", which is directly related to whether the ancient history framework can be established, national cognition and cultural self-confidence.
The first Chinese archaeologist, Mr. Li Ji, returned from staying in the United States and first went to excavate the Village of Xiyin in Xia County, Shanxi, his purpose was to find Xia, in fact, what he found there was also Yangshao culture. Li Ji studied anthropology and did not specialize in archaeology and excavation, but the title of his doctoral dissertation was "The Formation of the Chinese Nation", which he has been reading. Then the Excavation of Yin Ruins by the Academia Sinica and the excavation of the Cockfighting Platform by the Beiping Research Institute are all aimed at implementing the most critical Xia Shang Zhou, which is at the intersection of documentary records, legends and archaeological discoveries, with archaeological evidence. Entering the twenty-first century, there is no problem between Shang and Zhou, and Xia has not yet been thoroughly implemented. Erlitou culture is basically the consensus of the academic community, but there are still many problems and controversies to be solved.
Regarding the understanding of Yangshao culture, Mr. Liang Siyong revealed the Yangshao-Longshan-Yin Ruins trimography in Hougang in 1931, confirming that Yangshao culture predates Longshan culture and Longshan culture predates Yin Ruins in the Shang Dynasty, and this sequence of development has become the consensus of scholars. As for the red pottery in the west, the black pottery in the east, and the Yixia things of Fu Sinian said that the connection between prehistoric legends and three generations has taken a step further. Mr. Xia Nai not only rediscovered the Yangshao site, but also retraced Anderson's western expedition route, correcting many of Anderson's confused strata and cultural years. In 1965, Mr. Su Bingqi used the typical faience pottery ornaments of the Cu Ding Xie Niu style, typical artifacts pointed bottom bottles, etc., and typical site analysis methods to raise the understanding of Yangshao culture to a new stage through type comparison, and then looked at the whole country with the same method of fauna type, and found that all major regions in early China had their own cultural evolution lineage and civilization sparks, some of which were quite wonderful, such as the Hongshan culture in the Liao River Basin, the Liangzhu culture in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, and the Qujialing-Shijiahe culture in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River. Combined with the later Shang and Zhou Dynasties, Sichuan Sanxingdui, Jiangxi Oceania and other amazing archaeological discoveries, the theory of the origin of civilization is full of stars (pluralism), which has a great impact on the traditional concept of the unification of the Central Plains. Mr. Yan Wenming discovered the unity of diversity in China's early culture with a golden eye of fire, recognized the formation mode of pluralism and integration of the Chinese nation and Chinese civilization, and he vividly compared it to the heavy petal flower model, believing that although the regional culture around Yangshao culture is wonderful, in fact, Yangshao culture still occupies the position of the flower heart, and it is still the bull nose of the cow that needs to be held tightly after the Ding Ding dissolves the cow.
Longshan Culture Thin tire black pottery high handle cup National Museum collection
Liangzhu Culture Yubi National Museum Collection
It can be said that the masters of Chinese archaeology have devoted a lot of attention and energy to Yangshao culture and related issues.
The Chinese civilization and the Chinese nation we are talking about today as a community of common destiny have not existed since ancient times, but have a process of gradual formation and development or a general trend of history, which has different connotations and manifestations at different stages. For example, we have nearly 2 million years of Paleolithic archaeological discoveries, but these people and their culture and today's Chinese nation can not be said to have a direct relationship, can only show that the continent of East Asia has long been suitable for human survival. The regional ethnic culture and cultural inheritance of identity are gradually constructed after the agricultural society, and Yangshao culture is a key node in between. Because the previous human beings followed environmental changes and chased food resources and continued to migrate, there were many gaps in the period, and after the emergence of agriculture, people gradually settled down and began to form villages, and the mobile population slowly developed into relatively fixed tribes and regional cultural traditions with common ancestral identity and archaeological views, and then formed countries and civilizations.
New archaeological discoveries have confirmed that Yangshao's faience pottery does not have to travel so far to Europe to climb relatives, China is not only the world's first place to invent pottery and faience pottery, but also one of the original agricultural origins, and there are two spontaneous agricultural systems - rice and millet (including millet and millet) farming in the north and south of the parallel development, which is unique in the world. The Yangshao culture was formed at the intersection of the two major agricultural areas, or the result of the intersection of the two major agricultural systems in eastern Eurasia. These two major agricultural systems originated from the loess plateau on the southeast coast and northwest respectively from about 10,000 years ago, and were first encountered in the southeast edge of the Loess Plateau, that is, in the upper reaches of the Huai River in Henan Province, in the southeast edge of the Loess Plateau in the past 80,000 or 900 years ago, and the Jiahu culture that operated rice cultivation and domesticated the Pei Ligang culture, the Magnetic Mountain culture, and the Laoguantai culture, which jointly gave birth to the Yangshao culture with the loess belt as the main distribution range. It can be said that the Yangshao culture was formed after integrating the two major agricultural systems of the north and the south, and took the lead in forming a clustering explosion advantage in the valley basins of several large yellow lands that are easy to reclaim in the middle reaches of the Yellow River, and then continuously colonized in the northwest direction by the rise of the temperature in the best climatic stage of the Holocene warm period, occupying almost the entire Loess Plateau and its periphery, thus occupying the relative advantage between regions in terms of population and scale. With the in-depth development of archaeological work and the widespread use of new means such as flotation methods, the coexistence of millet rice has not only been continuously found around Songshan Mountain, which is the core area of the Central Plains, but also the mixed breeding phenomenon of millet and rice in low-lying areas in the Yangshao ruins and even many sites in western Henan, Guanzhong and Jinnan. Of course, as a culture in the yellow land, Yangshao culture is generally dominated by millet, and the proportion of millet is particularly high, so that Sheji (millet) has become synonymous with the Chinese state in later generations.
Pei Ligang Culture Stone grinding plates and stone grinding rods of millet are collected by the National Museum
Therefore, the Yangshao culture is an archaeological culture with a high degree of agrarianization that developed earlier in early China. Agriculture took the lead in developing its population growth rapidly, and then a large number of outward colonization and immigration, occupying a large territory, and laying the foundation of the population and language of early China, faience culture was carried to a wide area by its expanding population and formed a strong cultural radiation and psychological identity influence. Yangshao culture in the middle of the Miaodigou stage has become the most powerful culture in the East Asian cultural circle at that time, its core area includes the entire middle reaches of the Yellow River, north across the Loop, southeast into northern Jiangsu, west as far as Qinghai, southwest into northwest Sichuan and the outskirts of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, almost throughout most of today's China, in the lower reaches of the Yellow River Dawenkou culture, the Middle Reaches of the Yangtze River region of the Daxi culture and the Xiliao River Basin Hongshan culture, can also see its influence of cultural factors. Therefore, it is reasonable to say that this regional agricultural cultural tradition represented by Yangshao culture is the direct root of the Chinese nation and civilization.
Of course, Yangshao culture has not yet entered the stage of national civilization. When the late Holocene warm period of Yangshao entered the temperature fluctuation and decline channel, Yangshao culture also entered a relatively low tide period after reaching the climax, its central area appeared relatively quiet, and the peripheral areas of the early expansion gradually differentiated, while the surrounding areas, especially the eastern lowland areas, gradually entered the peak of the regional culture dominated by agriculture through continuous development, and even formed a rather complex social and cultural outlook, such as from north to south, the Hongshan culture formed a large ceremonial building integrating altar-temple-tomb. The Dawenkou culture has seen many thick burial tombs, the Qujialing and Shijiahe cultures have developed dense urban site communities, especially the Liangzhu culture around Taihu Lake in the southeast has built a large-scale large-scale water conservancy facility and produced a large number of exquisite jade, and so on. However, around 4300 years ago, with another round of climate fluctuations and cultural interaction agitation, the demographic and cultural factors in the north and southeast regions began to gather invariably towards the environmental livable zone of the Central Plains, Yangshao homeland took the lead in reorganizing ethnic groups, technologies and cultures after re-absorbing advanced factors from all sides, after the integrated innovation experiment of Jinnan Tao Temple, Erlitou culture rose strongly in the hinterland of the Central Plains, marking the core and orthodox formation of Chinese civilization. In the early days, the pattern of cultural interaction between different regions in China was completely changed. Later, we can see that this tradition has continued to grow and develop through the consolidation of the Xia Shang Zhou, and finally become the Chinese nation and Chinese civilization that have lasted for thousands of years and still stand in the east of the world.
Hongshan Culture Pregnant Woman Pottery Statue National Museum Collection Of Ritual Vessels
Therefore, it can be said that in the process of the incubation of the Chinese nation and Chinese civilization, Yangshao culture played the role of the founder, and some basic cultural connotations of population, language and farming economy were set at this time, and the Erlitou culture realized the integration and breakthrough of different ethnic groups and cross-cultural elements, formed a country beyond blood tribes and its cultural community, laid the real framework structure of Chinese civilization, and the Central Plains region of Yangshao's hometown became the cradle of Chinese nationalities and civilizations. Since then, the cultures of the surrounding regions, including the rice cultivation civilization in the Yangtze River Basin and the nomadic civilization in the northern grasslands, have continued to join in the interaction with the Central Plains, jointly creating today's Chinese nation and Chinese civilization.
Since the late Qing Dynasty established a conscious consciousness of nationality and culture in the interaction with Western powers, the sages have been pursuing more specific and accurate words than previous documents and legends on the basis of empirical materials and scientific logic on the historical background of their ancestors, the structural characteristics of chinese cultural traditions and their changes. For more than a hundred years, Chinese archaeology has been working hard to reconstruct ancient history, rebuild national identity and cultural self-confidence, and the discovery and research of Yangshao culture has always been one of the important main lines.
Today, one hundred years later, with the help of archaeology, we have a relatively in-depth new understanding of Yangshao culture, ethnic culture and Chinese civilization. Yangshao culture is a typical representative of early Chinese agricultural culture and the main root of Chinese civilization. Our nation has been able to stand in the world for thousands of years, with its blood and culture stretching on, and there are many experiences worth learning. From the perspective of Yangshao culture, the courage to innovate is one of them, it can be said that without pottery and agricultural inventions, there would be no Yangshao; being able to seize the opportunity is the second, without the suitable climate of the Holocene warm period and the easy development of the yellow land, there will be no Yangshao relative to the shortcuts of various places; openness and inclusiveness is the third, Yangshao draws on the common strengths of dry farming in the north and rice farming in the south, and the Erlitou culture that originated in the heart of the Central Plains is more inclusive of various advanced cultural factors known to the world at that time, creative transformation and utilization. Only then did it achieve an integrated breakthrough across ethnic groups and form the orthodoxy of Chinese civilization.
The 5,000-year-old ivory silkworm excavated from the double locust tree site proves that the Chinese ancestors began to breed silkworms and make silk more than 5,000 years ago
Of course, to objectively understand our national community, to cherish our own national community, to learn from historical experience and wisdom, to do a good job in our own affairs, to build our own homeland, but also to realize that China is only the unity of the world, the world is also evolving towards a pluralistic and integrated community of human destiny and a new form of civilization, and we must have the concept of sustainable development. The two major agricultural bases that merged into Yangshao may be the main result of the continuous evolution of modern people after they left Africa and arrived along the grasslands to the east of Eurasia. The rise of Erlitou not only fully absorbed and integrated and innovated the existing civilization elements of the East Asian continent, but also played a pivotal role in promoting wheat, cattle, sheep and metallurgical technology and its products from West Asia. In addition to the four major inventions mentioned in the tradition, millet, rice, silk, ceramics, tea, etc., have long affected the development of Indian, Lianghe and even Arab and Western civilizations. What is more worth exploring is the exchange of technology, concepts and other aspects, what role has it played? Today's global integration, competition among countries, exchanges and mutual learning among civilizations, in the construction of a new sustainable development of a new civilization, how to learn from each other's strong points and complement each other's weaknesses is indeed worth pondering.
I hope that the long river of history can enlighten us.
(The original title of this article is "DiscoverIng Yangshao, Re-understanding Yangshao - A Century of Archaeology To Trace the Straight Root System of Chinese Farming Civilization", the author of this article is a researcher at the China Academy of Cultural Heritage.) ）
Editor-in-Charge: Li Mei
Proofreader: Shi Gong