Page 129 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

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33a a. Jade plaque
5
l
Height 3.9 (i /2), width 7.1 (2 / 8)
Liangzhu Culture, c. 3200-2000 BCE
From Yaoshan, Yuhang, Zhejiang Province

Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Archaeology,
Hangzhou

b. Jade plaque
Height 6.2 (2 V 2), width 8.3 (3 V*)
Liangzhu Culture, c. 3200-2000 BCE
From Yaoshan, Yuhang, Zhejiang Province
Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Archaeology,
Hangzhou

Although both these plaques were excavated from
a Middle Liangzhu site at Yaoshan, they are techno-
logically centuries apart. The rather primitive-
1
33b looking monster face on the first plaque (a) is
represented by a pair of circular eyes and a cross-
shaped mouth, all executed in openwork. The
carving technique — clearly at an early stage in its
evolution — is evident in the Y-shaped cutouts
that represent the corners of the eyes: having first
drilled a hole, the carver cut lines radiating outward
(the bore is detectable where the lines meet). The
cuts are rough and clumsy, implying the use of a
soft saw-blade possibly made of a leather strap, as
are the engraved lines that describe the eyebrows
and nose. The archaic appearance and crude manu-
facture of this plaque exhibit an affinity with a
small openwork pendant unearthed from an early
Liangzhu site at Zhanglingshan in Jiangsu province
and raise the possibility that the two objects may
2
have been created contemporaneously, but the
plaque's smooth finish and the two beautifully
drilled holes that represent the eyes suggest that it
was probably reworked and refinished at a later
time.
The image depicted on the second plaque (b) 3
— a variant of the conjoined human figure and
monster face — is far more complex than that of
the first. A square-faced and unusually long-necked
human figure, wearing a feather headdress flanked

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