Page 25 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

Yang-shao simple burials furnished with the marvellous painted
pottery that has given the name "Yangshao culture" to a major
phase in Chinese prehistory lasting from about 5000 to 3000 B.C.
In 1923 Andersson, noting the resemblance between the Yangshao
pottery and that of the ancient Near East, went westwards to
Kansu in search of linking sites and there found, at Pan-shan,
graves with rather similar pottery. Since then, however, Chinese
archaeologists have found so many "painted pottery" sites in dif-
ferent parts of north China that possible connections with western
Asia are hardly discussed.
The most important discovery of the Yangshao culture oc-
curred in 1953, when a group of Neolithic villages and a cemetery
were unearthed at Pan-p'o, just east of Sian. The villages cover
two and a half acres; four separate layers of houses have been
found in a cultural deposit three metres thick, representing many
centuries ofoccupation spanning the fifth millenium B.C. The ear-
liest inhabitants lived in round wattle-and-daub huts with reed
roofs and plaster floors and an oven in the centre, the design per-
haps copied from an earlier tent or yurt. Their descendants built
rectangular, round, or square houses with a framework of
wooden planking, sunk a metre below ground-level and ap- '
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proached by a flight of steps. A further advance in the domestic ar- M^? W un S - r°"' ^ ot thf
n
r r Neolithic village attcr excavation; now a
chitecturc of late Stone Age China is marked by the three-room miucum.

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