Shamanism & the Origin of the Chinese State - Part One

The Early to Middle Neolithic: Dragon shamans, turtle scripts & pregnant jades

“Schafer argues that the chi 赤 ritual mentioned in the oracle-bone record involved burning or exposing a shaman or shamaness for rainmaking during drought, though it is as yet unclear whether burial M2 represents a sacrifice. Allan describes the self-sacrifice of the Shang king in a lost passage from the Shangshu 尚书. In this passage, King Tang, founder of the Shang Dynasty, performs a divination ritual, offering himself in sacrifice after seven years of drought. After he presents himself as an offering, it rains.”

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The scholar K.C. Chang spent his career advocating for a startling idea - that a shamanic-kingship substrate existed in a region that reached from China to Mesoamerica, and that both the Mayan and Chinese states were rooted in the charismatic and divine power of the shaman-king. I defy anyone to dismiss the early flowerings of Chinese civilisation as boring, as replete as they are with monstrous dreamlike animal bronzes, brutal human sacrifice, great collective efforts of earthworks, pyramids, astronomical platforms and a mysterious divination system of oracle-bones. What also makes early Chinese prehistory so interesting is that they were aware of themselves in a historiographical and literary sense much earlier than almost anywhere else, and the dynamic back-and-forth of Chinese and Western research and schools of thought have produced a rich body of ideas about how the state evolves from simple Neolithic beginnings. Of course to begin with there was no unified Chinese Neolithic, but rather a series of interlocking cultural zones which inhabited different river valleys, including the Yangzi, Yellow, Liao and Pearl. In tracing the fates of the earliest agricultural settlements we will move between the Peiligang, Yongshao and Hongshan peoples into the early Bronze Age and the first dynastic polities, including Taosi, Erlitou and Yanshi. Whilst the evolution of the material technologies and agricultural staples is a necessity, I want to try and bring to life the ideological and religious evidence, and how it merges with the political. To test Chang’s hypothesis, that shamanism under girds the state, we need to see what counts as a Neolithic shaman, and how they develop into something alien and compelling with the coming of the Bronze Age.

The Humble Beginnings of Northern and Central China: 8,000 - 5,000 BC

“On the death of Baoxi, there arose Shennong (in his place). He fashioned wood to form the hoe, and bent or straightened wood to make the hoe-handle. The advantages of tilling and weeding were then taught to all under heaven”.

- The Great Treatise II,” in Book of Changes (ca 9th century BC), translated by James Legge (1879), modified

Defining the beginning of the Chinese Neolithic is almost impossible, since it emerges through stages of pottery invention, sedentism, animal and crop domestication, village formation and stone tool development. By the start of the 7th millennium BC the climate had entered a period of warming, known as the Holocene Climate Optimum. The warm wet weather prompted the inhabitants of various river valleys to settle in one place, exploiting the abundance of plant and animal foods and building houses, food storage pits and cemeteries. One common location to build permanent structures was the foot or base of certain mountain ranges, especially in the north, in the zones between sloped foothills and floodplains (eg the Cishan culture near the Taihang mountains). Here we see the likely origins of broomtail millet domestication (Panicum miliaceum), although pinning down even the candidate wild plant has been extremely difficult. Based on bone isotope data, it looks like a slow and steady reliance on what are called ‘C4’ plants occurred over millennia. These include grasses, sedges, reeds and domesticates like millet, hence they are a good proxy for an agricultural diet. Something like a 1% increase per century in the amount of C4 plants accounts for the 25 - 30% plant diet seen around 7,000 BC, which rises to nearly 70% of the diet circa 2,500 BC. This suggests that nothing like intentional domestication occurred, and there’s evidence to show that much of the millet harvest was fed to dogs and pigs. The main Cishan site shows a huge focus on food production and storage, with around 80 storage pits discovered between 8,500 -6,000 BC, along with millet, polished stone tools, pestles-and-mortars, whetstones, spades, axes, adzes, chisels, grindstones and wild foods including fruits and animal bones. Sickles appear in later layers, and then the sites seem to be mysteriously abandoned. Some have argued that this reflects a standard seasonal cycle of mobility, where tools and food were buried as people went elsewhere, only they never returned on that final occasion.

Further south around the Yellow River we have the Peiligang culture and the remarkable site of Jiahu, the first settlement to use rice in that region. Here we see similar patterns of broad-spectrum plant food use, including rice, millet, yams, nuts, wild grasses and fruits. Analysis of pottery vessels from several Peiligang sites shows that alcohol was brewed from a rice substrate and a particular type of mould, which could mean that early rice cultivation was linked to fermentation rather than a staple crop. Jiahu itself will be discussed later in relation to its remarkable symbolic material culture, but suffice to say that the residents enjoyed an abundance of plant foods, along with wild and domesticated animals. Their health was better than the average and their lives seem unmarked by neither warfare nor social hierarchy.

Around the lower Yangtze valley the Shangshan culture (8,000 - 6,000 BC) earned its place in human history through the patient domestication of rice, without which the story of Eurasia would be markedly different. The Shangshan appear to us as a strange mix of expedient foragers and doggedly determined rice cultivators. Their pottery was simple but highly varied, their stone tools crude and regularly tossed aside after a single use. Like the other Neolithic cultures we have seen, the Shangshan pursued a plant-heavy diet, adding acorns to their menu of staples. Acorns are an interesting choice of food anywhere in the world, since they require intensive levels of processing up-front, which is why they are referred to as ‘front-loaded’ foods, all the work of leaching, straining, grinding and so on has to be done before they can be utilised. The Shangshan also showed the same patterns of burying and storing food and equipment before moving around in seasonal patterns.

Even without discussing southern China or the coastal cultures, we can see that the Neolithic in China should really be thought of as a number of overlapping and interlocking Neolithics, which all ultimately influence one another and pass around new technologies. The transition from the final Palaeolithic forager era to the initial Neolithic was slow and flexible. People retained their mobility and freedom to move around the landscape seasonally, and they made use of multiple food sources to buffer any bad years or poor harvests. Strikingly the common Neolithic zone in China is more plant heavy than the concurrent Neolithic in the Levant and Europe, and far fewer domestic animals were used. Eventually the suite of dog, chicken, pig and water buffalo would be increased when contact through the steppe brought cattle and bovine species to the far east, but during the early and middle Neolithic the connection between pig and millet in northern China was the dominant engine of the economy.

The Start Of Civilisation? Yangshao & Hongshan

The warm weather continued and the agricultural revolution cranked into gear century by century - the result was a steady increase in population size. As with other early farming communities around the world, an excess of population led to migration, over-exploitation of resources, social hierarchy and even social collapse. In northern and central China this took the form of new and larger cultural zones, such as the merging of the Peiligang and Cishan regions. We haven’t the space to explore how the middle Neolithic took form across the whole of China, but we will focus on two crucial cultures - the Yangshao and the Hongshan. The importance of these two proto-civilisations to later Chinese dynasties cannot be overstated, and we will explore in some detail the astonishing evidence for their rituals and religions later on.

The Yangshao culture was centred around the middle portions of the Yellow River, and incorporated earlier lifeways from the initial Neolithic settlements, including a reliance on pigs, broomcorn and foxtail millet, rice, the hunting of wild mammals, collecting shellfish and freshwater fish and gathering wild fruits and plants. Nut collection decreased and agricultural output increased. A cultural uniformity began to appear across villages, where groups of residential houses all faced an internal plaza. External ditches marked the boundaries of the settlement, outside of which adults were buried according to household and familial connections. Some larger houses began to appear as the Yangshao developed internally, and by 4,000 BC sites like Xipo showed a much greater level of social stratification. Here the centre of the village was occupied by larger buildings plastered in a kind of bright red mercury powder known as cinnabar. A construction technique known as ‘rammed earth’ emerges here, where layers of soil and clay were packed into a frame, leading to a solid and long-lasting structure. Rammed earth was to become a feature of later Neolithic and Bronze Age towns and cities, a gift from the Yangshao pioneers. It didn’t take long for this method of building foundations to quickly turn from internal prestige to external defence, and late Yangshao sites like Xishan in Henan possessed outer fortifications of rammed earth. The coordination and manpower required for such communal works, as well as the conformity of settlement patterns indicates that the Yangshao had a good system of social control, plenty of food and a religious-ideological framework to coordinate their lives from the family upwards.

The later end of the Yangshao coincided with a drop in annual rainfall, which, combined with increasing number of mouths to feed, led to waves of migrations from the Yellow River outwards to other regions, including Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai, even to the edges of the Tibetan Plateau. The sudden appearance of Yangshao style pottery, ash pits, stone tools and domestic animals in the Min River Valley around 3,500 BC all but confirms that streams of newcomers appeared in modern day Sichuan. Analysis of their pottery shows that they maintained their traditional brewing techniques, but incorporated new wild plants into the mix. Hints that they may have partially integrated with local Sichuan hunter-gatherers are also important, since the Yangshao are considered to be the primary candidate for the spread of the Sino-Tibetan languages, and exactly how the family branched and interacted with other languages is a topic of active research.

The Hongshan to the northeast of the Yangshao was a different beast altogether. Their sites stretched along the Daling and Liao Rivers, and their economic life was not that different from their neighbours, focused on millet, pigs and a semi-foraged system of nut, fruit and animal harvesting. However the Hongshan stood apart in their creation of purely ceremonial or religious sites, separate from domestic villages. As time went on religion became the key organising principle of their culture, and immense efforts went into producing temples, jade figurines and objects, cairns, face masks, altars and elaborate ritual settings. When the drought came for them, as it did for the Yangshao, they seemed utterly unprepared, and some form of collapse seems to have occurred. A few centuries later the population was smaller, less complex, and reliant on pastoralism rather than farming. In a tale as old as time, farmers abandoned their crops to raise herds of animals away from the disease and dirt of imploding village life.

Shamans and ancestor-cults: Early Neolithic

Now that we have something approaching a narrative to hang more detail on, we can turn to the topic of Chinese Neolithic religions or beliefs. To make things simpler we can bundle together a number of these early agricultural zones into a general ‘Early Chinese Cultural Sphere’, which includes the Cishan, Beixin, Baijia and Peiligang, with Jiahu as a special case. This covers roughly 3,000 years of human affairs, reflecting the transition from ‘mostly-foragers’ to ‘mostly-farmers’, with the cultural sphere emerging towards the end.

We can pick out two distinctive features of this zone which become bedrock religious and ideological foundations for early China - ancestor worship and diviner-shamanism. The evidence for ancestor worship has been laid out by Chinese archaeologists in the form of “zu zang” (族葬), meaning ‘clan burial’. It is possible to trace a thread from the Shang and Zhou dynasties back to the Peiligang culture, although this line of reasoning would repel most Western archaeologists. Peiligang and neighbouring sites show a remarkable conformity of burial patterns with a striking tendency towards neat rows of familial graves, marked by utilitarian grave goods and great longevity.

In Henan Province, many public cemeteries which pertained to the Peiligang culture had been discovered, including sites such as Peiligang 新郑 and Shawoli 沙窝李 in Xinzheng, E’gou 莪沟 in Xinmi 新密, Shigu 石固 in Changge 长葛, Shuiquan 水泉 in Jiaxian 郏县 and Jiahu 贾 湖 in Wuyang 舞阳…

…the same cemetery was either divided into groups, or in rows and columns, showing a certain spatial order. This special distinction might reflect the distance and differences between people of the same clan in terms of affinity and seniority. For example, the 114 burials in the Peiligang Site can be clearly seen in division into the eastern and western zones. With regard to the eastern zone, it was even further separated into two groups, with each group of burials arranged in rows and columns and some groups centred on a larger earlier burial—possibly a burial for an important ancestor. Upon further analysis, it can be estimated that the Peiligang Cemetery had continued for more than 100 years in total, and that the usual resident population represented by each group of the burials was around 10 people (equivalent to the size of a small family), while the usual resident population represented by the whole cemetery was around 30 people at the most…

-The Making of the Chinese Civilization (2023) Jianye Han

The care and effort taken to avoid disturbing older graves goes beyond what most similar cultures would have practiced. The bodies were prepared before death and dressed, sometimes bound, and the whole practice shows forethought and concern for who is currently buried and who will be buried next. As rice cultivation spread from south to north, so did the practice of fermentation, and Peiligang burials began to include ceramic vessels and plates of food and beer, often placed near the head. It is also remarked upon how few idols, faces or figurines appear throughout this period and place, perhaps indicating aniconistic beliefs - that creating images of the dead was taboo. At Shuiquan, a later Peiligang site, the first solid evidence appears to us for ancestral feasts. In the middle of the village’s cemetery there were two pits dug into the earth, one filled with charcoal, burnt clay and stones, and the other filled with huge quantities of pig bones and charred millet. A graveyard feast seems as close as we can get to definitively proving an early ancestral cult during this period of the Neolithic.

Turning to the cemeteries of Jiahu, we can add some incredible material culture to this picture of widespread ancestor worship. Jiahu is an astonishing site, dated to between 7,000 and 5,500 BC. It consists of over 50,000 square metres, with around 40 houses, numerous kilns, pits, rubbish dumps, trenches, a central large structure and over 300 graves. The houses were reused for long periods of time, and there is a suggestion that the earliest phase of Jiahu was culturally unique, before it became bound into the Peiligang zone, since it lies some distance away from the main sites. Chief amongst its treasures are the beautiful crane wing flutes, ceremonial pottery for drinking alcohol, carved tortoise shell rattles and some unusual burials. Many animal bones have been recovered from the site, including badger, hare, raccoon, leopard and the Yangzi alligator.

Of the 349 burials studied to date there are some interesting finds. About 4% of the graves contained turquoise, which is likely the earliest use of the stone in China. Given the importance of turquoise and jade to later Chinese aesthetics, it is interesting to see it first appear at Jiahu. Dog burials near graves and houses point to the possibility of commonplace dog sacrifice and certainly turtles played an important role for these people. Turtle shells and the underside of the animal were curated and sewn together, sometimes filled with pebbles and buried with certain people. Most significantly perhaps there are inscribed marks on some of these shells which have been argued to be very early forms of writing.

The Jiahu signs mainly occur on tortoise shells placed in graves. Given the careful positioning of the tortoise shells, several in sets of eight, and the groups of pebbles associated with shell pairs, we suggest that they formed part of the apparatus of a very early form of divination. Turtle shells were employed for divination five millennia later by Shang Dynasty rulers, and a recent study holds that the Shang logograph for “to divine” was in fact derived from a picture of a turtle or tortoise shell. The rounded pebbles may have had a counting function, implying the possible early practice of numerology, or the casting of auspicious numbers. However, the signs or numerals on the shells do not appear to correlate in any way with the size, the number of pebbles, or the placement of the shell in the burial. An alternative interpretation is that the tortoise-shell “boxes” simply contained the pebbles and were musical “rattles”. In this connection we wonder whether the flutes found in the graves might not also have been involved in a divinatory ritual, given the deeply-held, traditional conviction in China that music has cosmic significance . Perhaps the enigmatic fork-like objects (reminiscent of the stylised forked digging sticks (lei) held by sages in Han-dynasty images also had a ritual function

-The earliest writing? Sign use in the seventh millennium BC at Jiahu, Henan Province, China (2015) Xueqin Li et al.

One burial in particular, M344, stands out to us even after so many millennia. A large man interred with 8 inscribed tortoiseshells, each with pebbles inside, along with two crane bone flutes and several bone fork tools. Added to this his head was missing, most likely taken after he was initially buried. Altogether this paints a picture of a shaman-diviner type character. The esoteric use of proto-writing systems by select individuals is known across the world, as a feature of both shamanic and secret-society based religions, where ordinary people were not initiated into the knowledge or use of the symbols and specialised ritual tools.

These two features - ancestor worship and shamanic divination - did not go away with the development of the Yangshao and Longshan cultures. They solidified and became core tenets of early Chinese religion and social life.

Goddesses, jade and altars: The Middle Neolithic

Gao and Lee (1993) have conducted osteological analysis of human bones from secondary, multiple burials at the Shijia site, located in Weinan, Shaanxi (considered a variant of Yangshao). They propose that graves were composed of biologically related group members and that society had a patrilocal clan structure. They found a predominance of males in secondary burials, which contrasts with the more equal distribution of the sexes in Yangshao cemeteries with primary burials. The authors interpret this as a reflection of the difficulty of a ‘homeward journey’ for deceased females who had married out of their home village.

-Religion, Violence, and Emotion: Modes of Religiosity in the Neolithic and Bronze Age of Northern China (2015) Katrinka Reinhart

The development of the Yangshao and Longshan cultures saw the old-fashioned egalitarian ethos morph into something more strictly patriarchal within the clan and family. Unequal burials and house sizes, and increasing numbers of mortuary feasts appear in the record. Even today woman in rural China have to marry into another family in order to be remembered at a family altar, and unmarried women who die prematurely may be deliberately forgotten.

Added to this growing ancestral remembrance were, again, burials that smack of shamanic, the divinatory and the cosmological. At the Yangshao site of Puyang, Xishuipo, a man was buried with two animals alongside him. These were not bones however, these were shell mosaics of a tiger and what looks like a later Chinese dragon - at his feet a triangle mosaic and two human tibia bones complete the ensemble. Ever since this grave was uncovered in 1987 there have been endless conversations and theories about what it means, what it meant to the people of Yangshao Xishuipo. Some say it is an astronomical or cosmological map, others that the animals prefigure later Chinese astronomy, or that the beasts are shamanic familiars. Either way we have to accept the highly unusual nature of this burial, and the longevity of the dragon and the tiger within Chinese history, much like the Peiligang turtles and their inscriptions.

Turning back to the Hongshan culture northeast of the Yangshao, we saw earlier that they had separated their settlements into residential and non-residential - many say ritual. Looking at them more closely it is obvious that religion played an enormous role in their society. In Jianping county, over a wide mountainous area of around 50km, we come to the ritual complex of Niuheliang. This comprised 16 different feature-sites, made up of altars, cairns and mounds. Numerous figurines of jade and clay, some many times larger than a man, have been found. The area coincides with several mountain peaks and the altars and temple structures surround graves, more ornate than their southerly neighbours. Jade ‘pig dragon’ ornaments, nude female figures, scowling masks with inset eyes, intricately carved objects and subterranean structures abound here, the most famous of which is the large ‘goddess temple’. Again we have strong connections here with later Chinese thought, in particular about the role of mountains and of the heavens:

To the modern viewer, the most prominent general feature in the Niuheliang area is the sharp line of mountains rising to the southeast. Much later on in Chinese history, high mountains were traditionally and consistently regarded as sacred places where heaven and earth met and where various forms of shamanic and/or other ritual practice might occur (Barnes 1999, pp. 117–119). For example, later Chinese emperors typically held ceremonies on the top of famous mountains to legitimate their rule, particularly at the moment of succession. This connection between heaven-and-earth cosmologies, animal forms and the exercise of religious power (e.g. captured by the later notion of Wuism) is something that several authors have made very strongly with respect to Niuheliang (Rong 1993; Gu 2006; Cao 2007; Fu 1990, 2000), on the basis of finds such as jade artefacts thought to be in the form of specific animals, of a magical or religious human figure and of clouds (Fig. 8a, b), as well as the undeniable importance ascribed to depositing circular ceremonial ceramics on the tops of hills

-The Neolithic Ceremonial Complex at Niuheliang and Wider Hongshan Landscapes in Northeastern China (2013) Hai Zhang et al.

A similar landscape was found at Dongshanzui near the Daling River. Dated to around 3,450 BC, similar patterns of stone altars, symmetrical stone structures, jade figurines and images of pregnant women have been uncovered, reinforcing the link between femininity and sacred non-residential settlements in the late Hongshan. Around 250 jade objects have been recovered from Hongshan excavations, displaying a wide mix of animals, mythical creatures, personal ornaments, axes, adzes, cloud-hooks, tubes, beads and human carvings. The source of the jade is still under research but it doesn’t appear to be local, suggesting the Hongshan were connected enough to surrounding Neolithic peoples to trade or import or otherwise acquire the precious material.

Laying The Foundations

We’ve covered the early and middle phases of the north-central Chinese Neolithic in this piece, in a fairly brisk way given the amount of material and time depth at play. The transition from ‘mostly-foraging’ to ‘mostly-farming’ was a long, slow process, with little by way of interruption. The steady march towards a sedentary, agricultural life pulled together a number of uniquely ‘Chinese’ attributes, including a relatively high degree of social conformity and regularity, a push towards identifiable classes of ceramic, even across long distances, a great concern for family and clan cemeteries and a general egalitarian ethos. As the early Neolithic commenced there were already signs of civilisation in a way almost unheard of elsewhere in the world - proto-writing, musical instruments and perhaps planned graveyards which were tended to by families or clans for hundreds of years. This focus on ancestral care, exemplified by the feasts and alcohol brought to their resting places, continued through into the middle Neolithic, where we see women beginning to move into a more subservient role as less-dominant ancestral figures. The figure of the shaman-priest is somewhat mysterious to us, given the real lack of status differences elsewhere in these cultures. Even as the Peiligang shifted into the Yangshao and egalitarianism lessened, it was still the dominant mode, archaeologically speaking. The shamanic or religious burials and their extraordinary grave goods speak perhaps of divination, astrology, esoteric initiation. Central communal buildings as seen in the Yangshao are known from the ethnographic record to sometimes be the halls of secret societies, secret in the sense of their knowledge and rites, not their existence. Similarly with the fascinating late Hongshan ritual landscapes and figurines, there is no obvious central figure or priesthood, although we can’t discount that places like Niuheliang were off-limits to ordinary villagers, or they had limited access, like many temple complexes in many religions.

Next time we will complete our discussion of foundational shamanism when we fully explore Chang’s shaman-king hypothesis by moving through the late Neolithic into the Bronze Age. If we view this piece as the first evidence for early Chinese religion and politics, the contextual background if you will, then the next piece will show how all these tendencies become fully realised as the ideologies of the bronze age give full expression to divination, ancestor worship, ritual landscapes, monumental architecture, drinking vessels, jade objects, living sacrifices and the connection between heaven and earth.