Wen | drunken beauty team
On October 17th, the Yangshao Cultural Discovery and the 100th Anniversary of the Birth of Modern Chinese Archaeology opened in Sanmenxia City.
At the same time, Hu Heping, deputy director of the Central Propaganda Department and minister of culture and tourism, Xie Fuzhan, president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Lou Yangsheng, secretary of the Henan Provincial CPC Committee, attended the meeting and made speeches.
Why is a commemoration of a cultural discovery so grand?
What does Yangshao culture represent?
Discover Yangshao
The Yangshao culture, which is rich in Chinese characteristics, was first discovered by a foreigner. The discovery and preliminary study of Yangshao culture began with the Swedish geologist Anderson, a consultant of the China Geological Survey.
In 1918, Anderson traveled to Henan to investigate paleovertebrate fossils. In 1920, Liu Changshan, an assistant of the Andersons and collector of the Geological Survey Institute, went to Henan to collect animal fossils.
Liu Changshan lived in Yangshao Village in Shichi County for 3 days, and while collecting many animal fossils, he accidentally discovered an ancient cultural site. Previously, farmers in Yangshao Village had found and collected many ancient stone tools sporadically on this site.
Later, Liu Changshan excavated and collected some artifacts, bought some stone tools (mostly stone axes and stone knives) and a small amount of pottery from farmers' homes, transported them to Shichi County with donkeys, packed them into boxes, and shipped them by train to the geological survey institute in Beijing.
In Beijing, Anderson drew a startling conclusion based on these stone tools: Yangshao Village may be a sizable Neolithic site.
This inference made him really excited, and on April 18, 1921, After obtaining the consent of the Chinese government, Anderson came to Yangshao Village in Shichi County to investigate.
He was greeted at the station by Hu Yufan, the governor of the county. On April 21, when he went to Yangshao Village, Hu Yufan arranged for the escort of Wang Maozhai, also from the third section of the county government, who was escorted by four policemen by a car. That time, the place where he lived was in the idle house of wang Zhaoqi's family.
Anderson (second from left)
Anderson wrote in detail about the investigation in his 1934 work, The Daughter of the Loess:
After Arriving in Shichi, Anderson and several assistants lived in the county seat of Xiguan Gospel Church (Swedish pastor Shi Tianze Missionary Office), accompanied by Wang Maozhai, the third section recorder designated by the governor of the county government, Hu Yufan, and sent a police escort to Yangshao Village. Anderson traveled northeast of the Yili River in the east of the county seat to Yangshao Village, where he lived in the home of villager Wang Zhaoqi. Busy observing, photographing, and collecting artifacts every day, ash layers, ash pits and pottery pieces were found on the section of the ditch in the south of the village, and refined faience pieces and stone tools were found in the lower layer of the pile.
In the end, according to the excavated cultural relics, it was confirmed that it was the remains of China's ancient culture. According to archaeological conventions, the place of first discovery is used as the name of the type of culture, so it is called "Yangshao culture".
The "Yangshao culture" was not only the first prehistoric culture in China to be recognized through archaeological discoveries, but also filled the gap in the understanding that there was no Neolithic era in China at that time.
Scholars generally believe that this is the beginning of modern Chinese archaeology.
Cultural "Early China"
From the geographical point of view, Yangshao cultural sites are mainly distributed in the junction of Henan, Shaanxi, Shanxi provinces, as well as the WeiHe River Valley, where there are a large number of ancient historical legends about the Yellow Emperor and The Yan Emperor, and yangshao culture and the Yellow Emperor, the ancestor of Chinese humanities, may have a close relationship.
Archaeologists believe that the Central Plains culture with Yangshao culture as the main body laid an important foundation for the later cohesion of the Chinese national cultural community, calling Yangshao culture a cultural "early China".
Before the 100th Anniversary of the Discovery of Yangshao Culture, the "Academic Symposium to Commemorate the 100th Anniversary of Chinese Archaeology and the 95th Anniversary of the Excavation of Xiyin Ruins" was held in Yuncheng, Shanxi.
Yangshao Village in Henan, Xiyin Village in Xia County, Shanxi, Yuxi and Jinnan, two small villages across the Yellow River, occupy a very important position in early Chinese archaeology.
▲The ruins of Apricot Blossom Village
Xue Xinming, a researcher at the Shanxi Provincial Archaeological Research Institute, believes that the archaeological work in the Yangshao period in Shanxi has gone through three major stages of development in 1949 and 1990, each of which has its own key goals and achieved corresponding results.
In Xue Xinming's view, the Yangshao culture at that time not only spread northward through the edge of Lüliang and Jinzhong Basins, and integrated with other tribes in the Datong area, but also influenced the sea in the east, Ganqing in the west, the desert in the north, and the Yangtze River in the south, creating a cultural miracle unique in the prehistoric period.
The site of Xinghua Village in Shanxi was excavated from July to November 1982, when three archaeologists planned and led the excavation of the Xinghua Village site, led by Zhang Zhongpei, former president of the Palace Museum, the original director of the Chinese Archaeological Society, and the founder and founder of the archaeology major of Jilin University.
▲ Zhang Zhongpei (center) reunited with the archaeologists who excavated the Xinghua Village site for 30 years
In 1982, it was the early days of reform and opening up, and all parts of the country were in full swing, and Xinghua Village was no exception. On the eve of the excavation of the xinghua village site, local farmers have begun to take soil and burn bricks at the site on a large scale. If it were not for the timely arrival of the Jinzhong archaeological team, Zhang Zhongpei quickly decided to protect and excavate the site of Xinghua Village, a rare ancient cultural site that has lasted for 3,000 years, which has long been reduced to ashes.
Echoing the Yangshao cultural site, from 1980 to 1981, it was this excavation that basically clarified the cultural connotation of the Yangshao village site, further confirmed the existence of two archaeological cultures of Yangshao and Longshan at the Yangshao village cultural site, and clarified the stratigraphic superimposed relationship.
"The ruins of Xinghua Village began in the middle of the Yangshao culture and date back more than 6,000 years." Zhang Zhongpei believes that in the development of the Longshan period, the apricot blossom culture has become a strong archaeological culture with orderly inheritance and unique characteristics, and it is also an ancient cultural yardstick for Shanxi from Longshan culture to Shang culture.
What is even more special is that it is at the site of Xinghua Village that archaeologists have excavated a small-mouth pointed urn , a vessel that was mistaken for drawing water, which is actually the earliest wine-making vessel in China.
Later, according to the series of cultural relics excavated from the excavation, professor Li Yangsong, a famous archaeologist, said: "It can be shown that the ancestors of Xinghua Village in the Yangshao culture period have mastered the skills of grain winemaking, and there is no doubt that Xinghua Village is one of the birthplaces of grain winemaking in China." ”
The origin of wine culture
Scientific archaeological excavations have profoundly changed the Chinese people's understanding of ancestors and history, and also revealed to the world a systematic and complete way of the long-standing and brilliant Chinese civilization.
The unitary bottle, officially known as the "small-mouth pointed bottom urn", is a landmark artifact used throughout the Yangshao culture, and has been found in various Yangshao cultural sites. Although yangshao culture is also known as "faience culture", due to the obvious differences in the shape of small-mouth pointed urns in various stages of Yangshao culture, academics often divide different cultural periods with different small-mouth pointed urns.
▲ Small-mouth pointed bottom urn
The first person to propose a small-mouth pointed urn as a wine vessel was Su Bingqi, a famous archaeologist in China, who was also Zhang Zhongpei's teacher.
Su Bingqi wrote in "Reflections on reconstructing China's prehistory": "Small-mouth pointed urns are not necessarily all water-drawing vessels. Some of the oracle bone 'unitary' characters are the pictograms of the pointed urn. The meaning words composed of it, such as 'honor' and 'dian', should not be filled with water for daily drinking, or even daily drinking wine, but should be ceremonial and sacrificial wine. The pointed urn should be a sacrificial vessel or ceremonial vessel, which is called 'no wine, no ceremony'."
In Xinghua Village, our ancestors used small-mouth pointed urns to brew the first wine aroma of the Chinese land, and this endless vein of wine has been flowing for 6,000 years.
In today's Fenjiu Museum, there is a display that restores the scene of the archaeological excavation of the xinghua village site in Shanxi. Only 1 kilometer away from Dongbao Village, Xinghua Town, where the ruins are located, is today's Shanxi Xinghua Village Fen Distillery.