Later Developments (post-5000 ec) in the Chinese Neolithic
By 5000 BC, the Yellow and Yangzi basins were well populated with Neolithic settlements (as this book goes to press, Chinese archaeologists are preparing publications on new sites in the lower Yangzi, with rice cultivation and pile dellings prior to 6000 Bc). What kind of cultural relationships can we see now? Are traces of a common regional origin for Chinese Neolithic cultures still evident?
The distributions of the major Chinese Neolithic traditions between 5000 and 3000 Bc are shown in Figure 6.5. In the north, the best-known tradition of this period, the Yangshao, was a direct descendant of the Peiligang culture. Also, with little doubt, it was a major (if not the major) direct ancestor of the Han Chinese cultural and linguistic tradition with its 4,000-year dynastic history. Yangshao sites occupy a large area of the middle Yellow River and its tributaries, stretching from Hebei westward to Gansu. Sites are large, with major excavated villages such as Banpocun, Jiangzhai, and Beishouling covering between 5 and 6 hectares, considerably larger than the average for the preceding Peiligang culture. The fine details of Yangshao assemblages are not of direct concern here, but village plans, cemeteries, and pottery kilns all attest complex, possibly even ranked, societies with developed technology. Yangshao people also had a system of notation, often scratched on pot rims, which might have been in part ancestral to the Old Chinese script of the Shang dynasty (ca. 1300 Bc).
East of the Yangshao we enter the zone of the Dawenkou tradition of Shandong. The first phases of this tradition, termed Houli and Beixin (ca. 60004500 ac), were very closely related to the Peiligang culture in pottery forms and may be regarded as an eastern extension of the latter. Thus, the succeeding Dawenkou culture proper (ca. 4500-2500 Be), which extends westward into central Henan and virtually meets the eastern limit of the Yangshao (Figure 6.5), can be regarded as sharing a high degree of common origin with the latter. Like the Yangshao, both the Beixin and Dawenkou cultures were based on millet production rather than rice. Dawenkou settlements are large, with cemeteries and similar indications of social complexity to the Yangshao (Pearson 1981). Interestingly, the burials sometimes show cranial deformation and removal of upper lateral incisors, the latter being a characteristic of several early Neolithic assemblages to the south, in the lower Yangzi region (Majiabang), Fujian (Tanshishan), and Taiwan (Beinan). Dawenkou pottery lacks paddle impression and is mainly plain or red-slipped, characterized by angular vessel forms which often have high pedestals with cut-out decoration. Symbols are also found on Dawenkou pottery that might be related to the notational system used by the Yangshao people.
Thus, the Dawenkou tradition may be seen as a potential link between the Yangshao tradition of the inland Yellow River and the Neolithic panoply of cultures that extends down the eastern coastline of China, to as far as Guangdong and Taiwan. During the fifth millennium BC these coastal cultures included the Majiabang of the Yangzi delta region, with the slightly older Hemudu culture immediately to its south in Zhejiang. The Daxi culture and its predecessors (Zaoshi/Chengbeixi and Tangjiagang) occupied the middle Yangzi, and, by perhaps 3500 Be, the Dapenkeng culture was established in Taiwan and coastal Fujian (Figure 6.5).
South of the Yangzi - Hemudu and Majiabang
The Hemudu culture, to the south of Hangzhou Bay, was one of the most dramatic discoveries by Chinese archaeologists during the 1970s. Prior to the discovery of Pengtoushan, Hemudu was the oldest rice-bearing site in China, dated at its base to 5000 Be. The oldest Hemudu pottery (from the basal layer 4) is fairly unusual in the Chinese context since it lacks ring feet and tripods. It is possible that it represents the incorporation into the rice-growing Neolithic landscape of a group not immediately derivable from the other cultural regions along the middle Yangzi, further upstream. Interestingly, portable pottery stoves occur in this culture, similar to a more recent tradition of pottery stoves still used on boats by "sea nomads" in the islands of Southeast Asia (especially in the southern Philippines and northern Borneo). Hemudu people therefore had links with coastal maritime cousins. Sites of Hemudu type occur on offshore islands in northern Zhejiang, attesting development of a raft or canoe technology (wooden paddles have been found in Hemudu itself).
Hemudu is of extreme importance because of the sheer quantity of material culture recovered, some with remarkable parallels in later cultures across the Pacific, a circumstance perhaps not totally coincidental. The site was located in a marshy zone close to the sea, and waterlogging has led to excellent preservation of organic remains. The most striking items include stepped and shouldered stone adzes with knee-shaped wooden handles, bone spades, pottery spindle whorls, bamboo matting, foundations for long timber houses raised on piles with mortise and tenon joinery (identical to joinery found in Majiabang sites, below),' and pieces of bone carved with zoned geometric and curvilinear patterns. Pig, dog, and perhaps water buffalo were domesticated and their droppings have been found in the site. In one 400-square-meter area a layer of rice husks and plant debris up to one meter thick was found, evidently the remains of an ancient threshing floor. According to Yan Wenming (1991, 1992), the site yielded rice remains equivalent to 120,000 kilograms of fresh grain.
Above the basal layer 4 at Hemudu comes layer 3, with pottery like that from Majiabang, a site a little further to the north near Shanghai. The Majiabang
culture lies immediately south of the Dawenkou and was culturally quite close to it, as was its Songze cultural successor, both dating overall to 5000-3000 BC. Majiabang pottery has tripods and pedestals, is sometimes red-slipped but rarely cord-marked. It resembles Beixin and Dawenkou pottery fairly closely but is less obviously related to that from Peiligang and Yangshao, as one would expect from the greater degree of geographical separation. Majiabang sites have alluvial or lake-edge locations, suitable for the ricegrowing economy of this culture (rice husks were also commonly used to temper pottery).
The Hemudu-Majiabang sequence thus incorporated the results of contacts from at least two directions. The rice-growing economy was presumably brought down the Yangzi or Huai, whereas some of the pottery features of ricegrowing Majiabang reflect contacts with millet-growing Shandong to the north. Such linkages suggest that by 5000 BC, if not before, all of the rice and milletgrowing cultures of central China, from the middle Yangzi to the environs of Beijing, were interrelated by contacts visible through their farming economies and pottery styles, just as they were a thousand years earlier through the intermediacy of Jiahu. The significance of a cultural ancestry founded in an original Peiligang-Jiahu-Pengtoushan Neolithic heartland of the seventh millennium BC will later become evident.