Page 148 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

FIG. i. Cat 38: inlay by large ears or horns (fig. i). Eyes on these plaques
and cross section. After come in two shapes, either unframed circles (as
Zhongguo Erlitou 1984,
38, fig. 5.1. here) or circles within pointed sockets. The upper
"horns," however, vary in every example. If the im-
age anticipates the motifs that play so large a role
in later bronze decoration (for example, the fang-
ding, cat. 46), and for which the anachronistic term
taotie has been employed since premodern times,
it nonetheless differs in a number of respects. No
consensus has emerged as to the significance of
such motifs, but their ubiquity in so many media
(bronze, stone, lacquer) and varied contexts — even
as early as the Erlitou culture — makes the question
worth pursuing.
Two plaques have been recovered at the San-
3
xingdui site in distant Sichuan province. They may
be roughly contemporaneous in date, a fact that
would point to the possibility of exchanges between
the bronze-using cultures of northern China and
the upper Yangzi River region in the early second
millennium BCE. Since hardstones also suggest
this possibility, the character of such exchanges
deserves attention. RT

1 Loehr 1965, no. 19 and Poor 1975, no. 13.
2 Excavated in 1981; reported: Zhongguo Erlitou 1984,
37-40, and pi. 4.
3 Zhao 1994, nos. 63 - 64.

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