Page 108 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

Painted pottery pen basin;
height 20.5 (8); Taosi
Longshan culture; exca-
vated in Tomb 2103 at Taosi,
Xiangfen, Shanxi province.

appear originally to have been painted in a wide-ranging palette of red, white, yellow, black, and
green. More significantly, the surfaces of many of these vessels bore decoration in lacquer.
The surprisingly large number of ritual jade objects, which may have functioned in the
ceremonial life of the Taosi court as insignia of rank and office, included bi disks, finely shaped
axes, large harvesting knives, and adzes. Stone and bone arrowheads were also found. Tomb
M 3015 was, moreover, provided with a small orchestra, consisting of two large, elaborately and
brightly decorated wooden drums with alligator skin coverings, and with what are thought to
be their tuning devices still intact, and a stone chime measuring some eighty centimeters in
length. The tomb occupant was also accompanied by three of his dogs.
The magnitude of M 3015 and the abundance and quality of objects that have been recov-
ered from other burials in the Taosi cemetery hint at the prosperity of this society and the ad-
vanced nature of its organization, which was both highly stratified and specialized; and they
likewise attest to the refined taste of its cultured elite. A fuller assessment of this culture and its
interrelationships with other societies of the late Longshan world, as well as its possible link to

the early phases of the Erlitou culture, will depend on identifying and excavating the neighbor-
ing settlement areas, once populated by this impressive society.
The evidence of the Taosi finds, moreover, has important implications for more general
issues bearing on the long-term preservation and transmission of visual language. It has been
commonly assumed that the Yangshao tradition of painted pottery and its complex decorative
syntax had been completely extinguished by the Longshan period, when a new tradition of un-

1O7 I TAOS I L O N G S H A N C U L T U R E