Page 120 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

Of all Liangzhu achievements, jade carving reveals an unparalleled artistic sophistication
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and technical virtuosity. The antecedents of Liangzhu jade carving can be traced to its parent
culture, the Majiabang culture, which arose in the fifth millennium BCE. Majiabang jades, lim-
ited to earrings, beads, bracelets, and small pendants, are technically crude, shaped by pecking
and then ground to a polish; many show pitted surfaces and bear clear scars of abrasion. Over
the subsequent two thousand years, jade carving witnessed tremendous advances, and by the
middle of the third millennium BCE, Liangzhu craftsmen were producing works of unprece-
dented quantity, variety, and artistic sophistication. The most distinctive forms include hi disks,
cong tubes, axes, bracelets, beads, pendants, fittings, and ornamental plaques, many of which
have complex shape, fine and elaborate surface decoration, and exceedingly lustrous finish.
Until recently, insights into the carving techniques of Liangzhu jade craftsmen have re-
mained elusive, largely because most of the recovered jades are finished products; traces of tool
marks, which might reveal how the jades were carved, have been smoothed out by polishing.
The discovery of roughly made hi disks at various sites and of jade fragments and quartz drill
bits at Mopandun (Dantu county, Jiangsu province), however, have begun to shed light on the
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techniques of Liangzhu jadework. Liangzhu lapidaries used rotating wheel-saws to slice jade
or extract it from large boulders, and some type of rotating mechanism for drilling and plane

grinding. (The extensive use of the potter's wheel in the Liangzhu pottery industry attests to a
mastery of rotary tools.) They seem to have shaped the jades from slabs with bowstring saws
(probably made of leather straps), as well as with thin stone blades and bamboo slips. Drills —
both solid and hollow — were used to bore holes; the jades were polished with leather and
pieces of bamboo and brought to a high luster with elutriated quartz sand whose grade approx-
imates that used in the modern jade industry.
The sources of the nephrite that constitutes the raw material of the Liangzhu jades re-
main uncertain; mineralogical analyzes have eliminated all presently known nephrite deposits
in China and neighboring countries as possible sources for the Neolithic industry. Several
scientists suggest that local sources of nephrite existed in Liangzhu times but have since been
exhausted. A recent identification of nephrite deposits in Xiaomeiling, Liyang county, Jiangsu
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province — well within ancient Liangzhu territory — lends support to this theory. Although
the Xiaomeiling nephrite has proved to be mineralogically distinct from that of Liangzhu jades,
it nevertheless confirms the existence of nephrite-forming conditions in this area.
The splendor of Liangzhu jades not only reveals a flourishing material culture but also
sheds light on the social, political, and religious life of its people. Because jade is much harder
than metal and can be shaped only by grinding with abrasives, jade-working is extremely labori-
ous and time-consuming and requires specialized skills. The enormous quantity of refined jades
in lavishly furnished tombs points to a stratified society, in which the elite class could deploy
large numbers of specialized workers for their extravagant, conspicuous consumption of a pre-

cious material. The construction of the Fanshan mound (estimated at 180,000 cubic feet of

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