Page 101 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

In the late 19708, Tang Lan (1901 -1979) suggested that pottery pictographs of the
Dawenkou culture were already standardized and simplified and therefore quite advanced.
These pictographs, commonly identified as one of the distinctive traits of the Chinese civiliza-
tion or state-organized society, are comparable to bronze and oracle-bone inscriptions from
later periods. Tang believed that the Dawenkou culture was indeed already a slave or state-
organized society, but that argument has proved controversial. 3
Despite the fact that more than two hundred Dawenkou sites have been identified and
more than ten cemeteries have been excavated, the site at Yuchisi, Mengcheng, Anhui, has been
regarded as one of the most important. Covering approximately 100,000 square meters, it is
one of the largest residential settlements of this culture ever discovered. Archaeologists catego-

rized the Yuchisi site as a different regional type of the Dawenkou culture. At Yuchisi, remains
of row houses and more than one hundred and fifty tombs of a later period were excavated.
About half of the zun burial urns were for children. Yuchisi was the first site where coffinlike
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apparatuses were also incised with pictographs, expanding our knowledge of the function and
meaning of early pictographs.

T H E S H A N D O N G L O N C S H A N C U L T U R E
Most of the archaeological cultures of the Shandong Longshan age, even the now renowned
Liangzhu culture, were once called the Longshan culture. The Longshan culture was first dis-
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covered at Longshan, Licheng, Shandong, in 1928. According to the practice of the time, simi-
lar cultural remains took the name of the type site: Longshan. Since then, archaeological
excavations and research have greatly expanded our understanding of the Longshan culture,
which is now subdivided geographically into the Shandong Longshan, Henan Longshan,
Shaanxi Longshan, Hubei Longshan, Hunan Longshan, and Taosi Longshan cultures.
The Shandong Longshan culture is distinguished from the Dawenkou culture by its
high-stemmed, eggshell-thin, black pottery goblets (less than i millimeter thick), town walls of
pounded-earth (hangtu), copper and bronze tools, oracle bones for divination, and thunder-cloud
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patterns and animal-mask designs. Contrasting sharply with the painted pottery of the Yangshao
and Majiayao cultures, black pottery epitomizes the Shandong Longshan culture — to such an
extent, in fact, that the culture was also termed "Black Pottery Culture." The culture also produced
elaborate works in jade that were as sophisticated in craftsmanship as those of the neighboring
Liangzhu culture. A jade hairpin adorned with an openwork animal mask, excavated in 1989 from
Tomb 202 at Zhufeng, Linqu, Shandong province (cat. 24) is from one of the largest burials
of the Shandong Longshan culture. The tomb was furnished with painted wooden coffins and
chambers, an ercentai ledge, painted wooden containers, pottery vessels (including several eggshell
pottery goblets), ritual jade objects, stone and bone tools, turquoise ornaments, and dozens of

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