Page 141 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

Bronze plaque inlaid with
turquoise; length 16.5 (6V2);
Erlitou culture; excavated in
1984 from Erlitou, Yanshi,
Henan province.

similar that there are few recognizable standards to distinguish between them. This exhibition
includes bronzes and jades from the Western Zhou metropolitan area (cats. 76-77), the Zhou's
homeland (cats. 78-83), and the state of Jin, established by a member of the Zhou royal family,
in Shanxi province (cats. 84-90). Traditional historians believe that the Three Dynasties rep-
resent the mainstream of cultural and artistic development during the years in which they
flourished; recent archaeological finds, however, have shown that the situation may not be so
simple. As was the case during the preceding Neolithic period, distinctive regional cultures
continued to thrive thoughout the Bronze Age in the areas adjacent to the territories of the
Three Dynasties.
The third episode in the investigation of Early Bronze Age China was the extension of
archaeological investigation into the regions beyond the political scope of the Three Dynas-
ties. In northeastern China, the discovery of the Lower Xiajiadian culture in Inner Mongolia
revealed that many elements of the Erlitou culture were assimilated by the northeastern
Chinese peoples: jue and;za vessels in the Erlitou style were commonly employed in the Lower
Xiajiadian culture (cats. 44-45), and artifacts of both cultures display shared decorative ele-
ments, such as animal-mask motifs and cloud-and-thunder patterns (compare, for example
cats. 38 and 41-43). These shared characteristics show cultural influences from the Central
Plains extended into distant areas as early as the first half of the second millenium BCE. In
southern China, findings from Sanxingdui (Guanghan, Sichuan province) along the upper

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