Early China: A Social and Cultural History

by Li Feng

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  There is also evidence that Taosi in its late stage might have been destroyed by force during the political turmoil caused possibly by people based on another large site located to the south.20 However, during the hundreds of years when Taosi was prosperous, it must have been a major cultural and economic center in the lower Fen River valley in southern Shanxi. It exhibits beyond any reasonable doubt features of a social system that was sufficiently complex with a stratified population that was divided into at least two classes. The development of functional roles such as astrologers and administrators, and a possible centralized administration within the city, are all evident in Taosi, if not beyond it.

  Burial remains also tell of the ongoing process of social differentiation in Taosi. Over 1,000 tombs have been excavated in Taosi, clearly belonging to three classes. The great tombs measure 3 × 2 m or more, are furnished with wooden coffins, and are buried with an inventory that can easily exceed 100 items including beautifully painted wooden vessels, jades, and skeletons of pigs. The occupants of the medium tombs are buried with a wooden coffin, pottery wares, and jades, totaling twenty to thirty items. The small tombs are very narrow pits of 0.5 m wide with no wooden coffin and no burial goods at all, but they make up 90% of the burials in Taosi. If we take this as the direct reflection of distribution of wealth in the Taosi community, then more than 90% of the wealth in Taosi would have been concentrated in the hands of the top 10% of the population, higher in comparison to the concentration of wealth in many modern industrialized nations (the figure for the United States was 69.8% in 2007). Doubtless Taosi was a highly stratified society.

  Moreover, we know that the process of social stratification was simultaneously going on in other regions in China. The Liangzhu culture in the Yangzi Delta, roughly contemporary with the Longshan cultures in the north, was remarkable for its production of jades. A large mound tomb found in Sidun in Jiangsu contains more than fifty beautifully crafted jade objects; such tombs containing large numbers of jade objects were also found in a number of sites near Hangzhou Bay in Zhejiang Province. These are clearly elite burials that are usually segregated from the commoners’ tombs in the regional society. In 2007, a Liangzhu city centering on Mojiaoshan protected by walls even slightly larger than Taosi was discovered in the district of Hangzhou, and it became clear that some of the previously known rich burials possibly belonged to elite members who lived in this large city. The discovery suggests that contemporary with the Longshan culture in the north, South China had been undergoing a similar process of social transformation leading to higher levels of social complexity. However, in South China this process was suddenly interrupted around 2000 BC when the Liangzhu culture mysteriously disappeared from the surface of the Earth.

  Furthermore, recent archaeological discoveries suggest that the social life of the Longshan millennium towns was not only redirected by the new political dynamics that emerged among its population, but, perhaps related to the rise of the social elites, was enriched by a number of new technological and cultural inventions. Among these new advancements, the most important ones are high-quality pottery-making, metallurgy, and possibly, early “writing.”

  High-quality pottery-making

  For the Longshan people, pottery wares were not merely utensils for their everyday life; on the contrary, a certain type of pottery-making technology was developed clearly with the purpose to facilitate elite life in the Longshan towns, particularly in the Shandong region on the east coast. This is the so-called egg-shell pottery reputed for their extremely thin body-wall – each piece is an artwork emerging from a very delicate process of crafting that required professional skills. They are often found in large town sites with wall enclosures and were apparently luxury items for elite use, possibly associated with ritual or religious activities of the elites (Fig. 2.8.1–2).

  Fig. 2.8 The Longshan and Liangzhu town culture: 1–2, egg-shell pottery from the Shandong Longshan culture; 3, Copper bell from Taosi; 4, inscribed shard from Dinggong, Shandong Province, Longshan culture; 5, inscribed shard from Longqiu, Jiangsu Province, Liangzhu culture; 6, jade ornament, Liangzhu culture.

  Metallurgy

  Recent archaeology has shown beyond doubt that metal objects were in use across a large geographic area during the Longshan millennium in North China. In the world context, the earliest use of copper ore dates to 9000 BC in Anatolia, almost as old as the Neolithic pottery in the region; from 7000 BC small copper objects like pins and drills began to be made in Mesopotamia. Between 4500 and 3000 BC residents of lower Mesopotamia manufactured a considerable number of tools and weapons in copper. In China, small metal objects dating from the beginning of the fourth millennium have been found in the wide geographical area from Gansu and Qinghai in the west to Shandong in the east, and a few sites belonging to the Longshan culture in Henan have also yielded copper ores and debris, suggesting that metal objects were locally manufactured. So far the most important discovery is a copper bell found in a middle-size tomb in the outer wall enclosure in Taosi in 1983 (Fig. 2.8.3). The metallurgical composition of the bell was determined to be of 97.86% copper, 1.5% lead, and 0.16% zinc – it is almost purely a copper object. But most importantly it was cast in a holistic process by using clay molds, a method that was to become the mainstream bronze manufacturing technology thereafter in China, but underdeveloped in the West.

  Early writing

  For a long time scholars have been fascinated by the numerous marks engraved on Neolithic pottery from as early as the Cishan–Peiligang period. Although not a few have tried to seek the origin of the Chinese writing system in these Neolithic marks, such attempts ultimately failed to establish the basic fact that they were representations of language, or were used to form any system of notation, the minimum requirement for “writing.”22 However, in the past fifteen years, archaeology has turned out a new type of materials. On a pottery shard found in the walled town of Dinggong in Shandong, eleven graphs were incised in five rows to form a continuous “reading.” Another shard was found at Longqiu in Jiangsu, belonging to the Liangzhu culture, which carries graphs arranged in two rows: on the right are four graphs each depicting a distinctive type of creature, seemingly buffalo, snake, bird, and something else; on the left side are four abstract graphs each leading a creature on the right (Fig. 2.8.5). These graphs apparently exhibit a higher level of communication than the isolated marks on the Yangshao pottery. On each of the two shards the graphs form an internally related sequence of ideas that can only be connected through language. Therefore, the majority opinion has been that these are early forms of writing in China, although they are not necessarily ancestral to the system that we call “Chinese writing.” Despite the fact that they are of unknown linguistic affiliation and are after all unreadable, their appearance suggests that in some of the Longshan millennium towns at least a high culture was already in place to serve the spiritual and administrative needs of the Longshan/Liangzhu elites.

  The Question of Longshan “Chiefdom”

  The above discussion has highlighted the dramatic social changes that took place during the Longshan millennium. The question is: where should we place these changes in the chain of social development also observed in other regions of the world? Or are the Neo-evolutionist theories mentioned earlier in this chapter applicable to China? There has been a trend among archaeologists in China to redefine the Longshan societies as “archaic states.” It was earlier suggested that the settlements belonging to the Longshan period in Shandong constituted three levels, and that the walled towns were centers of the “archaic states” with centralized political power. Similarly, the senior archaeologist Zhang Zhongpei proposed in 2005 that the Liangzhu culture in southern China had also entered the stage of civilization characterized by the political power of the state. The alternative view is held, mainly by scholars in the West, that Longshan society exhibits features of a “chiefdom.”23

  The high level of social complexity viewed in the archaeolo
gical records of the Longshan period (and the Liangzhu culture in the south) in fact poses a major problem to the theory of social development originally formulated by anthropologists. Recent anthropological literature tries to redefine the boundary between “chiefdom” and “state.” It has been suggested that, in addition to the difference in exercising power as noted above, the organization of chiefdoms was normally based on kinship structure, but that of the state was not necessarily so. Chiefs lacking internally specialized enforcement machinery avoid delegating central authority and rely on the local power of sub-chiefs, while kings systematize and segment their power so as to undermine local authority.24 Furthermore, there has also been the opinion among some anthropologists that chiefdom societies were “dead end” in the evolution of society, and they simply did not have the potential to develop into state-level societies.

  There is considerable ambiguity in the definition of “chiefdom,” and anthropologists will doubtless continue to face difficulties in refining their theories to match the archaeological reality. It is nevertheless acceptable to call the Longshan societies “chiefdoms.” The theoretical problems notwithstanding, the evidence analyzed in this chapter suggests that the Longshan societies were clearly at a higher stage of social development than the relatively equalitarian societies of the Yangshao culture. If “chiefdom” is the inevitable form of social organization developed out of the “segmentary lineage system” which seems to relate well to the Yangshan societies, then “chiefdom” would seem to be a reasonable term to highlight the organizational complexity of the Longshan societies, before the rise of the state (Box 2.2).

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  Box 2.2 Lajia: A Neolithic Village Ravaged by Earthquake 4,000 Years Ago

  In summer 2000, archaeologists who were excavating the residential site called Lajia, located on the plateau to the north of the upper Yellow River some 190 km to the southeast of Xining, capital of Qinghai Province, were stunned at what they saw gradually emerging from the ground (Fig. 2.9). In a subterranean dwelling pit (F4) of 3.81 × 2.95 × 3.55 m, they first encountered the skeleton of a young woman (age 28–30), kneeling on her left leg and leaning on the east wall, an unusual situation for a dwelling site. Below her chest were found the remains of 1–2-year-old infant with his/her two little arms around the waist of the mother. The young mother was apparently pressed down by a huge weight from above as she tried to support her body with her left arm on the floor in order to protect the child. To the west part of the pit, two clusters of skeletons were found. Another younger mother (age 35–40) was surrounded by three teenagers and one child under 10, who died together in the southwest corner of the pit. To their north, four other children, all under 13 and the youngest aged only about 3, held each other in a group, and died while struggling for their lives. Some of the bodies were heavily twisted by an unknown force. In addition, an older male of 40–45 was found lying close to the entrance to the dwelling and another of 15–17 was found crouching and dead on the top of the central stove.

  Fig. 2.9 The earthquake site in Lajia and the earliest noodle in China.

  This was the first find of such a scene of disastrous death in Chinese archaeology. Continuing fieldwork on the site helped by geologists identified the subterranean pit as the base of a loess cave and determined that the cause for its collapse was a major earthquake, although the village might also have been subsequently invaded by floods. The damage was extensive in the village that was formed by both dwelling caves and dozens of house foundations located in its east part. For some reason, children probably belonging to different families were gathered in cave F4 which then became their common grave when the earthquake hit the ground. Because of the special moment of the collapse, some details of the village life have been preserved – it is above all astonishing that when archaeologists turned over a pottery bowl left on the floor, they discovered the earliest noodle in China! The initial laboratory work suggested that the noodle was made of starches derived from millet, but subsequent studies suggest that it must have been made of flours of wheat. Pottery typology identifies the village with the Neolithic Qijia culture in its late phase, dating around 4000 BP, thus likely slightly later than the astronomical observatory in Taosi.

  An additional discovery in Lajia was an earth-built sacrificial platform located in the open square of the village. At the center of the earth platform was found the luxury burial of perhaps the priest of the village, yielding as many as fifteen beautifully made jade objects.

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  Selected Reading

  Fiskesjö, Magnus, and Chen Xingcan, China Before China: John Gunnar Andersson, Ding Wenjiang, and the Discovery of China’s Prehistory, Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities Monograph 15 (Stockholm: Östasiatiska museet, 2004).

  Falkenhausen, Lothar von, “The Regionalist Paradigm in Chinese Archaeology,” in Philip L. Kohl and Clare Fawcett (eds.), Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

  Chen, Xingcan, “Archaeological Discoveries in the People’s Republic of China and Their Contribution to the Understanding of Chinese History,” Bulletin of the History of Archaeology 19.2 (2009), 4–13.

  Chang, K. C., and Xu Pingfang (eds.), The Formation of Chinese Civilization: An Archaeological Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

  Crawford, Gray W., “East Asian Plant Domestication,” in Miriam T. Stark (ed.), Archaeology of Asia (Malden: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 77–95.

  Chang, K. C., The Archaeology of Ancient China, 4th edn. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).

  Liu, Li, The Chinese Neolithic: Trajectories to Early States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

  Underhill, Anne, “Variation in Settlements during the Longshan Period of North China,” Asian Perspectives 33.2 (1994), 197–228.

  1 See Johan Gunnar Andersson, Children of the Yellow Earth: Studies in Prehistoric China (New York: Macmillan, 1934), pp. 224–225. Andersson, a pioneer of the study of Neolithic cultures in China, was affiliated to the National Geological Survey, having been hired by the Chinese government in 1914. Neolithic cultures worldwide differ from one another vastly, but they share some common features: the use of polished stone tools, the technology to manufacture pottery wares, subsistence dependent on agriculture and the domestication of animals, and the sedentary way of communal life.

  2 “Diffusionism” is an anthropological theory popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It holds that all world cultures ultimately originated from one or at most a limited number of culture centers. Similarities between cultures are regarded as the result of diffusion of traits from one society to another, and cultural relations are viewed in terms of cultural genealogy.

  3 For a discussion of this regionalist paradigm in Chinese archaeology, see L. von Falkenhausen, “The Regionalist Paradigm in Chinese Archaeology,” in Philip L. Kohl and Clare Fawcett (eds.), Nationalism, Politics and the Practice of Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 198–217.

  4 “Neo-evolutionism” is a social theory that was developed in American anthropology in the 1960s. Neo-evolutionist theories accept the essential idea of evolution of Charles Darwin, but they allow different tracks of evolution, called “multilinear evolution” in the words of Julian Steward (1955), and reject the idea of universal social progress. For a first reading, see Julian H. Steward, Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972; first edn. 1955).

  5 K. C. Chang, The Archaeology of Ancient China, 4th edn. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986) p. 234.

  6 On this new trend, see the summary by Xingcan Chen, “Archaeological Discoveries in the People’s Republic of China and Their Contribution to the Understanding of Chinese History,” Bulletin of the History of Archaeology 19.2 (2009), 4–13.

  7 Marshall D. Sahlins, “Political Power and the Economy in Primitive Society,” in G. E. Dole and R. L. Carneiro (eds.), Essays in the
Science of Culture in Honor of Leslie A. White (New York: Crowell, 1960), pp. 390–415; Marshall D. Sahlins and Elman R. Service (eds.), Evolution and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960); E. R. Service, Primitive Social Organization (New York: Random House, 1962).

  8 See Marshall D. Sahlins, “The Segmentary Lineage: An Organization of Predatory Expansion,” American Anthropologist 63.2 (1961), 322–345.

  9 Norman Yoffee, Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p, 16.

  10 In archaeology, the name of a non-literate culture is usually derived from the site where its remains were first identified. But sometimes variations do occur when a culture is renamed after its most representative, and usually most prominent site.

  11 This is the Nanzhuangtou site in Hebei. The carbon-14 dating method was developed by Willard F. Libby in 1946 at the University of Chicago. Carbon-14 is one of the carbon isotopes. It exists in all living organisms at an even level and decreases at a constant rate (half of the amount of the radioisotope at any given time will be lost in the succeeding 5,730 years) after the organism dies. By measuring the amount of carbon-14 that still remains, the age of the organism can be determined. Carbon-14 dating was introduced to China in the 1960s, and is now widely used in Chinese archaeology.