Shamanism & the Origin of the Chinese State - Part Two
The Late Neolithic: The Longshan expansion, the cities of Taosi & Shimao and the dawn of the Bronze Age.
Our first foray into deep Chinese prehistory revealed a pattern of loose agricultural communities which slowly intensified their dependency on domesticated crops and animals over millennia. These groups manifested a deep concern for ancestry, public cemeteries, ritual landscapes and possibly a divino-magical cosmology. We covered these developments from the early Neolithic of the Peiligang and Shangshan to the later Yangshao and Hongshan, taking us from around 8,000 BC to 3,000 BC. Following the scholar K.C Chang’s hypothesis that ‘Chinese civilisation’ was built on a shamanic foundation, we will continue to follow the story in northern/central China, laying out how the Longshan culture represents the great transition from agricultural to dynastic polities, and how two important proto-cities - Taosi and Shimao- connect the gaps between early Chinese literature and archaeology. Many have argued that the Xia Dynasty emerges here, bringing myths and stories of great floods and astronomy into the realm of testable science.
The Longshan - The Black Pottery People
The textbooks explain that the Yangshao culture of the Middle Neolithic (5,000 - 3,000 BC) gives way to the Longshan culture of the Late Neolithic (3,000 - 1,900 BC). Both occupied the middle to lower portions of the Yellow River, both farmed millet and pigs, but the Longshan began manufacturing a striking ‘egg-shell’ black style of ceramics, a clear break in the archaeology which signaled their arrival.
What does it mean that one culture transitioned into another? Does it mean that the same people just gradually altered their way of life in some way, producing new forms and styles of material culture? Does it mean that a totally new people arrived and merged with, occupied or replaced the old? This question is at the forefront of modern archaeology, and the powerful combination of genetics and archaeology can now offer some answers.
One of the clearest archaeological markers for social change is how groups of people choose to bury their dead. Mortuary rites are amongst the most conservative of our customs as a species, and the apparent switch from public cemeteries to private, family oriented burials as seen from the Yangshao to the Longshan indicates something profound was happening. As described by one 2021 genetics paper:
Compared to the Middle Neolithic Yangshao culture, the Longshan witnessed the shrinking of public cemeteries and the disappearance of large tombs such as secondary burials with multiple individuals. At the same time, archaeology indicates enhanced social mobilities in terms of both the integration of multicultural artifacts and the gathering of groups of people with different dietary habits. These changes have suggested to archaeologists that the Longshan witnessed a major transformation in kinship organization, perhaps from large extended to small nuclear families…
Here we provide direct evidence that consanguineous mating had been practiced in Late Neolithic Longshan society, around 2,000 years earlier than its attestation in the historical record in China. In addition, by characterizing the genetic kin relations of individuals from the same household, we provide an explicit indication that extended family beyond the nuclear family served as a basic household in Longshan society and that genetic kinship still acted as a major focus of social organization during the Longshan period
-Ancient genome analyses shed light on kinship organization and mating practice of Late Neolithic society in China (2021) Ning et al.
Several other papers have pointed to a subtle but distinguishable shift in genetic composition from the Yangshao to Longshan, not a complete turnover of population, but enough to suggest that something had shifted beyond merely altering pottery styles. Often referred to as the ‘Yellow River cluster’ or ‘group’, the genetics have brought back a complex topic of debate that was given voice by K.C Chang 60 years ago.
In his influential 1963 work, The Archaeology of Ancient China, Chang used the phrase ‘Longshanoid’ to describe what appeared to be a huge expansion from a central cradle - the Central Plains. Black Longshan pottery had been turning up everywhere from Taiwan and Fujian in the south to Hebei and Liaoning in the north, defying easy explanation.
In trying to identify all the different regional expressions of the Longshan culture, researchers discovered that it had two central ‘cores’ with a huge number of more peripheral contacts. ‘Shandong’ and ‘Henan’ Longshan have entered the literature, along with Shaanxi and Shanxi. As if this wasn’t complicated enough, contacts with two very different cultures - the Dawenkou and Liangzhu - potentially brought these Sino-Tibetan farmers in contact with Austronesian speakers. Between the Henan, Shandong and Shaanxi regions alone, there have been over 4,000 Longshan sites identified.
To simplify down what should take many hundreds of pages to explain, the Longshan phenomenon could be described as a cultural invigoration as the Neolithic societies of the Yellow River clashed with those of the Yangtze. Soybeans appear more frequently on the menu, the remains of horses, sheep for wool, the silkworm becomes more prominent and rival polities develop, attracting craftsmen and producing ever more higher quality ceramics and artwork.
Settlement distribution for the Longshan [Shandong] period also shows processes of nucleation of sites centered in two large settlements, Liangchengzhen (272.5 ha) and Yaowangcheng (367.5 ha), representing two coexisting polities. Each is characterized by a four-level settlement hierarchy, but there are different patterns of settlement around the large centers: The settlement system centered in Liangchengzhen is more nucleated than that in Yaowangcheng. This pattern may represent diverse strategies of elite control in the two polities (Underhill et al. 2008). Some regional centers appear to have been locales for craft production, making both utilitarian and prestige goods. Recent excavations at Liangchengzhen, for instance, have shown compelling evidence for stone tool production (Bennett 2001; Cunnar 2007). Prestige objects, such as jade and eggshell pottery, may also have been manufactured at the site (for references, see Liu, L. 2004: 108). These phenomena suggest that the nucleation of population toward large centers was partially attributable to the development of craft specialization and production at these locations
-The Archaeology of China (2012) Li Liu & Xingcan Chen, page 217
An optimal climate, growing population and increasing connectivity with the rest of China meant the Longshan quickly outstripped the previous lifeways of their ancestors. Their world was much bigger, and their cosmology began to reflect that.
We’ve already seen that previous Neolithic settlements such as Jiahu were concerned with a magico-divination rite which involved tortoise shells. Although the Longshan were not a direct ancestor to these people, they came from the same general cultural milieu, and also used animal parts for divination. At Zhoujiazhuang and then Taosi there have been huge numbers of cow scapulae uncovered which were treated and then burnt. These ‘oracle bones’ would be more mysterious to us were it not for the fact that the later Shang Dynasty used cow oracle bones in the same way, granting us unusually nuanced insights into how they made have been used a thousand years earlier. As before, continuity remains an important theme.
As was the case at most Late Neolithic sites, oracle bone use 169 at Taosi and Zhoujiazhuang was widespread and still fairly ad hoc compared to later periods, when it became closely associated with elite ritual practice (Flad, 2008).
Almost all of the bovine oracle bones were modified prior to burning by removing the spine and part of the lateral side of the scapula to thin the bone. In some cases, circular hollows were also carved into the bone, with heat subsequently applied inside of the hollows. The Taosi and Zhoujiazhuang examples show that this method of preparing and burning oracle bones—which was dominant at the Shang capital at Anyang seven hundred years later—was already starting to be practiced during the Longshan period.
-New Insights into the Origins of Oracle Bone Divination: Ancient DNA from Late Neolithic Chinese Bovines (2016) Brunson et al.
Taosi - City of the Emperor?
The urban enclosure of Taosi is one of Neolithic China’s greatest achievements. Nestled in the Linfen Basin, surrounded by mountains, Taosi was the most advanced settlement for the majority of the Longshan period. It survived from 2600 - 2000 BC, and is typically divided into three phases each lasting around 200 years. The first phase saw a 56 hectare enclosure made from rammed-earth which was then expanded to nearly 300 hectares in the middle phase. Cemeteries and tombs were present inside the boundaries, revealing a strict hierarchy of social classes - the majority of people were buried with little to no grave goods, whilst a minority were interred with many unusual, exotic and potentially religious objects - more on those in a moment.
7km south is Taosi is Mount Dagudui, which was the heart of a highly productive quarry. If Taosi was based on any kind of material power, it was likely an elite capture and control of sandstone, quartzite and marble tool production. Workshops inside the Taosi enclosure reveal huge areas of craft production, and potentially a rammed-earth ‘managerial building’. The city traded these finished artefacts with other regional and local settlements, where finished tools are often uncovered. Pigs, sheep and a small number of cattle were reared at Taosi, the cattle bones also being used for oracular magic by heating them over a fire. Standardised pottery was produced for the majority, whilst elite tastes tilted towards ornate painting and colours. The focus on serving dishes and containers, along with the city’s food storage pits being within the elite enclosure area, suggests that distribution of food was closely regulated, and that popular feasts were a way to keep social control.
The main Taosi public cemetery was huge, at its height it covered 3 hectares. The grave goods which accompanied the top-tier elite burials, and the private ‘rooms’ and tombs which they used, were amongst the most striking of the period - ground and polished stone objects, jade ornaments, alligator-skin drums, elaborate painted pottery and exotic objects which have yet to be identified. Two particular types of jade artefact in the tombs were common in this time period, the bi and the cong. The bi was a flat jade disk with a hole in the middle, typically interpreted as the heavens, being a flat circle which revolves around an axis. The cong was a curious object which combined a circular tube or disk inside a square box or tower. Generally this is interpreted as the unity of heaven and earth, although we can never know that for certain. Alongside these grave goods are other important artefacts, these include some of the earliest examples of metalwork in the region: a copper bell, and an arsenical bronze ‘gear’ wheel which has been affixed to a jade bi disk.
While all this is interesting, and points to clear changes in social hierarchy during the late Neolithic, Taosi is most famous for its astronomical platform. Around a hectare of the site was given over to a secluded observatory, made from rammed-earth, with rammed-earth columns placed in a pattern which followed the sunrise. The discovery of a lacquered pole in a grave was interpreted as a gnomon for a sundial, and further excavations at the observatory have reconstructed it as a kind of three-tier alter/platform. Why this has become particularly important for Chinese archaeology is that a connection can be drawn from the material evidence to the legendary figure of Emperor Yao, one of the traditional ‘Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors’ - the culture hero / demigod sages who introduced order, fire, agriculture and the foundations of civilisation in China. In Chinese classical texts such as the Yao Dian and Wudibenji, Yao ordered the observation of celestial bodies in order to create a calendar.
The later stages of Taosi saw a kind of extreme social unrest. Some of the rammed-earth constructions were broken and elite tombs ransacked. Alongside this the secluded palace area was converted rapidly into a tool production centre. Add to this the increase in skeletal remains with marks of violence, and the last phase of Taosi seems to have been a type of uprising or invasion, which quickly settled down into something new but stable. The end of Taosi was also quite sudden, leading Chinese scholars to speculate that intense floods from the degraded loess beds could have destroyed the enclosure. This is by no means implausible at all, but it does dovetail rather nicely with stories about Emperor Yao and the Gun-Yu Great Flood myth.
Taosi was a remarkable synthesis of traditional Yellow River Neolithic lifeways with an emerging elite culture which may have institutionalised power over both the raw materials and production of tools, as well as the more esoteric power of astronomical knowledge and predictions. In an agricultural era, control over a solar and lunar calendar would provide great benefits, perhaps alongside oracle-bone divination and the ornamental trappings of power. Royal dynasties and magico-religious figures do not always work well together, but in this instance they could have been one and the same, managing the mundane world of pigs and lithics, whilst drawing power as a conduit between the heavens and earth, maintaining harmony in the fields and the quarries.
Shimao - Longshan pyramids near the steppe?
While the central plains around the mid-Yellow River valley were developing, the northern Longshan regions were undergoing their own trajectory towards urbanism. Agro-pastoralism was the dominant economic mode, a mix of millet farming and herding livestock. The reason for this was geographical, the Ordos region is the transitional zone between the Mu Us desert and the Hetao grassland plains - in other words - the border between agriculturalists and nomadic pastoralists.
Perhaps it is no surprise then that the city of Shimao (2,300 - 1,800 BC) would spring up in this place, future dynasties would do battle here time and time again with horseback raiders and herders, from the Xiongnu to the Mongols. Shimao was another remarkable moment in the bubbling up of a distinctly Chinese civilisation. It consisted of a 400 hectare double-layered stone-built enclosure, surrounding a central terraced palatial building, formerly a pyramid which was reworked to make a 70 metre tall structure with 11 platforms. The walls were around 2 metres thick and lined with gates, towers, buttresses and fortifications. In the middle of the city were 8 residential areas and 6 cemeteries, along with craft working sections, refuse areas and so on. This was a huge complex, larger than Taosi, larger than any in China at the time. The walls, baffle-gates, towers and large numbers of stone arrowheads point to Shimao being a defensive enclosure, and no residential settlements have been found outside the walls in the immediate vicinity - this was designed to keep someone out and protect those within.
Added to this Shimao also shows us another glimpse of the religious-cosmological beliefs of the Longshan era. Most famous are the skull-pits beneath the East Gate, turning up around 100 skulls underneath the earliest construction work. These are believed to be mostly from young women and show signs of decapitation and some burning. As with other ritualistic and mortuary rites we’ve seen for Neolithic China, this one again seems to have a long pedigree, as Shang dynasty archaeology and texts confirm that human and animal sacrifices were used to prevent disasters at the start of building works:
According to oracle-bone inscriptions unearthed at Yinxu, the capital of the late Shang dynasty (1250–1046 BCE), “beheading of living human” was part of sacrificial rituals (Wang and Gu, 2007). This practice has been confirmed archaeologically by the presence of human and animal sacrificial burials associated with the construction of large buildings at Yinxu (Chang, 1980: 95). Ancient texts also recorded that Duke De of Qin (677–676 BCE) issued an order to “dismember dog bodies at the four city gates to prevent disasters” (Sima, 1982 vol. 14: 509). The Shimao skull pits predate the Shang human sacrifices by some 1000 years.
-The first Neolithic urban center on China's north Loess Plateau: The rise and fall of Shimao (2018) Zhouyong Sun et al.
The East Gate also contained jade artefacts, pushed between blocks and displayed on the outside, buried under new building works or just nearby in the ground. Combined with the skull pits, we have to say that the East Gate in particular held some deep magical or spiritual importance - moving from the exterior world of danger to the interior sanctuary - protected by the impenetrable walls.
Jades also appear all over the site, especially in the few graves that had not been looted over the centuries. A particular type of blade, called a yazhang jade blade, is found all across the Longshan world and further afield, demonstrating that Shimao was still connected to a wider symbolic world. Ceramic raptors, alligator skins, copper and bronze ‘gear’ bracelets, polychrome murals, carved stone heads and cowry shells are all also listed as ‘ceremonial’ or ‘ritual’ objects, many also being embedded into the Longshan and earlier Neolithic worldview.
The end of Shimao is a mystery. One theory holds that a general climatic cooling led to this marginal zone becoming more difficult to hold and its inhabitants abandoned it. What makes it more interesting is that, unlike Taosi, Shimao is not mentioned in any historical Chinese texts, or even hinted at. This has been difficult for the general approach of Chinese archaeology to manage, which has always had a strong historiographical tendency. This kingdom or polity has disappeared from the records, and yet, it was obviously connected to the outside world.
The Dawn of the Bronze Age ‘Shaman’?
Readers will have noticed that metal objects were present both at Taosi and Shimao, heralding the arrival of the Bronze Age, or more precisely the Erlitou and Erligang states and the dawn of the Shang Dynasty. For K.C Chang the Shang king was a shaman-king, rooted in the practices of the earlier Neolithic. We’ve seen how the rise of the Longshan cultures and cities really broke with the former egalitarianism of the Middle Neolithic, and both Taosi and Shimao functioned through some kind of hierarchy. The oracle-cattle bones, astronomical platform, human sacrifices, elite ceramic vessels, bronze and copper ornaments and more frequent warfare all point towards an emerging elite which could manipulate its power both through violence and esoteric knowledge.
The appearance of arsenical bronze and even some stone molds from Shimao for casting knives suggests that these early Chinese agricultural communities received metal working knowledge from outside, before quickly mastering it themselves. One paper has suggested that:
Thus, we here recognise that one of the routes by which Erlitou gained bronze technology was precipitated by climate change, which first brought more people to Shimao, and then, as a colder dry spell made agriculture difficult, drove bronze-using peoples south, first to Taosi and then to Erlitou. It has long been accepted that the much earlier use of bronze in the steppe must have contributed to the development of China’s production and use of bronze.
-Shimao and Erlitou: new perspectives on the origins of the bronze industry in central China (2017) Rawson
Another that:
The discovery of the Seima-Turbino culture in China is of great importance, as it demonstrates with material evidence that Chinese metallurgy derives from the cultures of the Eurasian Steppe. However, the Chinese did not adopt the metallurgical techniques from the West wholesale… Chinese metallurgists creatively invented the technologies for casting bronze vessels, in whose hands and craftsmanship bronze smelting and casting had become an art form. The Taosi culture first invented bells and vessels made of arsenical bronze, and whole sets of bronze ritual implements were created as represented by the bronze artifacts of the Erlitou culture. These inventions and creations greatly propelled the progression of Chinese civilization
-Seima-Turbino Culture and the Proto-Silk Road (2016) Meicun Lin
But this is really just a teaser for the next installment where we will examine the rise of these bronze age states, and examine how the politico-religious worldview which had grown from the early Neolithic found its full expression in the Shang Dynasty, according to K.C Chang at least.
References
The Making of the Chinese Civilization (2023) Jianye Han
Who is that Human at Shimao? China’s Ancient Belief in Metamorphic Power (2020) Elizabeth Childs-Johnson
The Archaeology of China: From the Late Paleolithic to the Early Bronze Age (2012) Li Liu & Xingcan Chen
Food between the country and the city: The politics of food production at Shimao and Zhaimaoliang in the Ordos Region, northern China (2018) Owlett et al.
Religion, Violence, and Emotion: Modes of Religiosity in the Neolithic and Bronze Age of Northern China (2015) Katrinka Reinhart
Most interesting, thank you.
Literally the most interesting series I have ever read, eagerly waiting for part III.