The Influence of Liangzhu culture from Archaeology (Archaeological Notes)

Tech 2023-07-22 08:52:01 Source: Network

The ancient city of Liangzhu is located in Yuhang, Zhejiang Province, but the Liangzhu culture more than 5000 years ago is not limited to the ancient city of Liangzhu. It covers the Yangtze River Delta in a broad sense today, with the Qiantang River and the Taihu Lake Lake basins as the center, reaching south Shandong and north Jiangsu in the north, and the Jianghuai region in Anhui in the west

The ancient city of Liangzhu is located in Yuhang, Zhejiang Province, but the Liangzhu culture more than 5000 years ago is not limited to the ancient city of Liangzhu. It covers the Yangtze River Delta in a broad sense today, with the Qiantang River and the Taihu Lake Lake basins as the center, reaching south Shandong and north Jiangsu in the north, and the Jianghuai region in Anhui in the west. Archaeological discoveries of Liangzhu culture are scattered all over the place, which together form the puzzle of ancient Jiangnan civilization.

The Liangzhu site in Jiangsu is widely distributed and of great significance. The Caoxieshan Site in Suzhou has preserved the three most important cultural layers of the Neolithic culture in Jiangnan: Majiabang culture, Songze culture and Liangzhu culture. The cultural layers stacked in sequence contain rich information about the lives and labor of the ancestors, and are known as the benchmark of prehistoric culture in Jiangnan. This site is the first of all Liangzhu culture sites to find jade ritual vessels such as cong, bi, yue, etc., which reflects the division of ritual jade at that time, such as "Cang Bi Li Tian, Huang Cong Li Di". The unearthed jade cong has an outer and inner circle, engraved with animal face decorations, making it the first jade artifact unearthed in prehistoric Chinese tombs and solving the problem of jade cong dating.

The age of Changzhou Sidun Cemetery is late in the early or early in the middle of Liangzhu culture, which is equivalent to the age of the first stage of Liangzhu Fanshan Cemetery. Fanshan is the highest level cemetery in the south of the Taihu Lake Lake, and Sidun is the highest level cemetery in the north of Taihu Lake. The area of Sidun Cemetery is larger than that of Fanshan. Taking the Sidun Site as the center, Sidun and surrounding sites such as Gaochengdun, Qingchengdun, Ruomaoding, Xiangdun, and Jidunshan also reflect a similar system structure and functional zoning as the "Liangzhu Ancient Kingdom".

An important feature of Liangzhu culture is the jade culture. These jade artifacts are not only diverse in type and exquisitely crafted, but also used to clarify hierarchy and rank. At that time, the king had jade cong and jade bi representing divine power, and jade yue symbolizing royal and military power, among which the most prominent was jade cong. 33 jade congs were unearthed from Tomb 3 at Sidun Site, which is the largest number of jade congs unearthed in Liangzhu culture tombs so far.

Xinyi Huating Site and Xinghua Dongtai Jiangzhuang Site are typical sites of Liangzhu culture's northward expansion. In order to expand the Lebensraum, the ethnic groups distributed in this area, taking the southern Jiangsu region as the base, marched north. In the Jianghuai and Huanghuai regions, they launched a lasting confrontation with Dawenkou people living in the lower reaches of the Yellow River, and integrated into the family of Chinese civilization in the collision. The site of Huating Site is the junction of Dawenkou culture and Liangzhu culture. Most of the pottery unearthed here belongs to the Dawenkou culture, while the jade has the Liangzhu style. There are quite a few objects of the two cultures buried in the tomb.

Jiangzhuang Site, located at the junction of Xinghua and Dongtai, is a high-level cemetery of Liangzhu culture found in the area north of the Yangtze River. In the western area, which is dominated by the accumulation of Liangzhu culture in the Neolithic, 284 tombs were excavated and cleared, which is the largest and most densely buried cemetery of Liangzhu culture found outside the core area of Liangzhu culture at present, and also the most complete and abundant cemetery of Liangzhu culture to date, providing extremely valuable material materials for the study of the burial customs, health status, social organization relations, ethnic attributes and even genetic genes of the ancestors of Liangzhu. In the middle of the tomb area, jade cong and jade bi were also found.

In the whole Jiangnan region, there are hundreds of Liangzhu culture sites, such as the Fuquan Mountain site in Shanghai, where well preserved tombs of Songze culture and Liangzhu culture are found, including many late Liangzhu tombs and jade congs. If we connect these important sites of Liangzhu culture into one piece, we can show the influence of Liangzhu culture at that time.

Archaeologists refer to the early Jiangnan prehistoric cultures of Majiabang, Songze, and Liangzhu as "Ma Songliang". "Five thousand years of civilization in the Taihu Lake Lake, Songze Liangzhu connected" is the evolution of this civilization. The ongoing archaeological project "Research on Civilization Patterns in the Lower Yangtze River Region" aims to address issues such as the transformation of civilization patterns from Songze to Liangzhu, and attempts to decipher the code of prehistoric civilization in Jiangnan. The decoding of this civilization story is worth looking forward to.

(The author is a professor at the School of Art and Archaeology, Zhejiang University)

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