Page 100 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

THE DAWENKOU Before China advanced into the Bronze Age, two successive cultures, the Dawenkou and Shan-
dong Longshan, occupied a prominent position in the lower Yellow River valley during the late
AND SHANDONG prehistoric period. The core area of the Dawenkou culture (c. 4300 to 2500 BCE) was in the
present-day provinces of central and southern Shandong, northern Jiangsu, and Anhui, while
LONCSHAN the Shandong Longshan culture (c. 2500 to 2000 BCE) dominated the central and eastern
Shandong peninsula and the northern Huai River region of Jiangsu province. With nearly iden-
CULTURES tical geographic distributions, the two cultures spanned a regional continuity of approximately
twenty-three hundred years, and along with contemporaneous prehistoric cultures in other
areas of ancient China, their social, economic, and cultural evolution contributed to the forma-
tion of dynastic civilization in Bronze Age China.

TH E DAWENKO U CULTUR E
Named after the type site at Dawenkou, Tai'an, Shandong province, excavated in 1959, 1 the
Dawenkou culture is sometimes referred to as the Qinglian'gang culture on the basis of an ear-
2
lier excavation (1951) at Qinglian'gang, Huai'an, northern Jiangsu province. By general agree-
ment, however, the term Dawenkou is generally accepted and widespread.
The climate in which the Dawenkou people lived was temperate and warmer than today, like

most of the Yellow River valley, and millet was the staple crop. The Dawenkou employed sickles
made of bone, tooth, and shell, as well as polished and often bored stone axes and hoes. Built
either at or half-below ground level, houses were either square or round and probably had eaves
and conical roofs. The Dawenkou people wore hair ornaments, necklaces, and bracelets made of
jade, stone, bone, tooth, ivory, and pottery. They had a distinctive custom of head deformation
and tooth extraction. Their burial etiquette presented another distinctive attribute of the cul-
ture: the larger rectangular graves included second-level ledges (ercengtai, or narrow earthen
platforms, usually for holding funerary goods), wooden coffins and burial chambers furnished
with the heads and lower jaws of pigs, the teeth of river deer (hydropotes inermis), and turtle
shells. In the late period of the culture — the early third millennium BCE — a disparity is evident
between the funeral articles of the rich and poor and even in the placement of their tombs.
The artistic achievement of the Dawenkou culture is manifested in works of carved ivory
and bone (engraved tubes and combs), fine "white" pottery ("baggy legs" gui pitchers and he
tripods), and thin-walled black pottery (goblets or stemmed cups). The thin black pottery pre-
ceded the production of the Longshan eggshell black pottery. In general, most pottery of the
Dawenkou culture was red. Many pottery vessels, painted with beautiful geometric patterns,
have been found from the early period, but few from the late period have been recovered. The
late period is represented mostly by pottery zun urns with incised pictographs (see cat. 23),
ritualized stone and jade items (ben andyue axes), and animal-shaped pottery vessels. Most clay
vessels were made on potter's wheels.

99 DAWENKO U AN D SHANDON G LONGSHA N C U L T U R E S