Page 110 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

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Painted pottery pan basin reserve, extend the full length of its body in slightly
staggered alignment, creating a checkerboard
!
Height 8.8 (3 V 2), diam. 37 (14 / 2)
effect. The head, marked by a tiny black eye, shows
Late Neolithic Period, Taosi Longshan Culture
two lappet-shaped appendages above and below,
(c. 2500-2000 BCE)
and a long dentated snout and lower jaw. The pin-
From Taosi, Xiangfen, Shanxi Province
nate sprig emanating from between the teeth is a
The Institute of Archaeology, CASS, Beijing puzzling aspect of the image, which must once have
served as an important key to the figure s symbolic
The Taosi cemetery is remarkable for its lavishly meaning. The serpent is encircled by a band of red
furnished elite burials, and it is from one of these paint around the upper edge of the wall and the
that the present earthenware basin was recovered. 1 canted rim.
Its painted decoration, consistent with the other The serpent motif in China reaches far back
ceramics in the exhibition from this site, was in history, but it occurs infrequently before the
not applied until after the vessel had been fired. Anyang period. It makes its first, and so far unique,
It shows around the sloping inner surface a red appearance during the early Neolithic, in the form
serpent, seen against a jet-black ground, which of an eared or crested serpent painted on the
uncoils clockwise from a bulge at the vessel's cen- shoulder of a hu from the Banpo level at Beishoul-
ter. Two rows of scales, half red and half in black ing, Baoji, in Shaanxi province, dating to the fifth

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