Page 64 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

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Painted pottery hu jar
Height 20.8 (8 Vs)
Neolithic Period, Late Banpo Culture
(c. 4000-3500 BCE)
From Wangjiayinwa, Qin'an, Gansu Province
Gansu Provincial Museum, Lanzhou

This water jar, 1 like the basin (cat. 2), was recovered
from one of the late Banpo settlements in the
vicinity of Qin'an, north of the Wei River in eastern
Gansu province. Its painted decoration similarly
reflects an advanced phase in the evolution of the
Banpo ceramic tradition, in which hitherto distinct
images, such as those offish, become subsumed
within complex, integrated decorative schemes that
move uninterrupted across the surface.
The design on the present vessel, applied in
a thin brown pigment, has been convincingly
interpreted as the image of a pig's face, which is
2
repeated three times around the shoulder. The
snout is represented at the center of each face by
an oval in reserve, containing two circles that indi-
cate the nostrils. Two crescent shapes, also in re-
serve, serve as the eyes, while the wavy line below
and the angled line above represent the jaw and
furrowed brow. The design is arranged so that the
eyes belonging to one face are also shared with
the two adjacent faces. The baluster-shaped neck
ends in a sloping upper section, which echoes the
curvature of the shoulder. Four pairs of back-to-
back triangles surround a circular perforation at
the top.
Unlike the fish on cat. 2, which had once existed
3
as discrete and easily recognizable images, the pig
seems to have been added to the design repertoire
during the final phase of the Banpo tradition and
has no prehistory as an independent image. The
particular design on cat. 4 is also rare, and finds
its single close parallel in the designs painted on
the two registers of a bottle-shaped water container
from the Banpo site of Jiangzhai, near Xi'an, in
Shaanxi province, located 300 kilometers east of
4
Qin'an. Although domesticated pigs (Sus domestica)
and wild boar (Sus scrofa) are both found among

63 I YANCSHAO CULTURE: BANPO