Page 43 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

bution, chronology, and behavior; the distribution of microlithic sites; prehistoric diet, settle-
ment and subsistence patterns; the evolution of landscape and topography; climatic and envir-
onmental variations; cultural adaptations and tool technologies; the commencement and
development of sophisticated societies; the origins and evolution of rice agriculture; early
Bronze Age sites; early Shang civilization; and prehistoric and ancient cultural interaction be-
tween East and West in the pivotal region of Xinjiang province. Archaeological collaborations
have extended into conservation and restoration. Among the great achievements of the past
decade are discoveries of hominid occupation of China around one million years ago; early do-
mesticated rice cultures; prehistoric walled towns; and the earliest known Buddhist sanctuaries. 97
Our knowledge of ancient China, once purely speculative, is now based on a systematic,
scientific history encompassing nearly two million years. Two male Homo sapiens, one a well-
preserved cranium unearthed at Dali, Shaanxi province, in 1978, another a relatively complete
human fossil, including the cranium dated to 280,000 BP were found at Jinniushan, Yingkou,
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Liaoning province, in igS^ The two finds provided data on the transition from Homo erectus
to Homo sapiens. For the late prehistoric period, the momentous discoveries of jade works of

the Liangzhu culture (cats. 29 - 36) in the lower Yangzi delta and of the Hongshan culture
(cats. 10 - 22) in northeastern China have revealed a high level of skill in the crafting of hard-
stone materials, and corroborated the theory that Chinese civilization arose in many places.
Along with the Taosi and Shandong Longshan, these cultures employed stratified burials (cats.
24-28). Additional evidence of walled towns and pictographs (cat. 23) has led many scholars to
believe that China emerged as a state-organized society in the third millennium BCE."
The great historian Sima Qian (c. 145-86 BCE) documented dynastic China from the Xia
dynasty (c. 2100 BCE) to his era, but he was unable to reconstruct a year-to-year chronology
prior to 841 BCE. Archaeological finds have now made it possible to create a temporal and spa-
tial framework of early bronze cultures that corresponds with the first "Three Dynasties" (Xia,
Shang, and Zhou). A very early Shang city located at Shixianggou, Yanshi, Henan province,
provides crucial information to ascertain the nature of the Erlitou culture and the distinction
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between Xia and Shang. Modern archaeology has revealed, in areas traditionally described as
backward, advanced and complex cultures that created objects of surpassing beauty. This is
perhaps most evident in the works included here from the Yangzi River watershed (cats. 57 -
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75). The extraordinary bronze figures, masks, human heads, and spirit trees from Sanxingdui,
Guanghan, Sichuan province, and Dayangzhou, Xin'gan, Jiangxi province, are unlike those
found in the Shang metropolitan or the Yellow River area, but, almost all contemporaneous
bronze cultures shared the Shang dynastic ritual bronze vessels and motifs. 102
The material and artistic features of ancient Chinese cultures were poorly described in
historical documents. The record was silent on the huge underground terra-cotta army of the

First Emperor of the Qin dynasty (221-206 BCE). Today, however, Song dynasty paintings can
be compared with their excavated antecedents, which date more than one thousand years

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