Banpo
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Site of a Neolithic village located on the Wei River in China, dating to the earlier part of the Yangshao culture, 50004000 . A huge number of artifacts have been uncovered, including 8,000 stone and bone tools, pottery fragments, and clay figurines. The main cultivated crop was foxtail millet; the diet was supplemented through hunting and gathering. Pigs and dogs were domesticated, and evidence of hemp and silkworm cultivation point to textile manufacture. Some 250 graves have been excavated. See also Neolithic Period.
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Banpo
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Banpo, China
[Si]
Site of an early Yangshao village, now preserved in a museum at Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, dating to the 5th millennium bc. The residential area was enclosed by a ditch, outside of which were cemeteries and an industrial area that included pottery kilns. Dogs and pigs were domesticated while millet was the staple crop. Coarse pottery was cord-marked or stamped, but the finewares were painted in black and red with geometric designs or drawings of animals.
[Rep.: S. Lin, 1981, Banpo yi zhi zong shu. Xianggang: Zhong wen da xue chu ban she]
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For other uses, see Banpo (disambiguation).
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It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Xi'an Banpo Museum. (Discuss) Proposed since February 2011. |
Banpo (Chinese: 半坡; pinyin: Bànpō) is an archaeological remain discovered in 1953 and located in the Yellow River Valley just east of Xi'an, China. It contains the remains of several well organized Neolithic settlements dating from 5600 - 6700 BP according to radiocarbon dating.[1][2][3][4] It is a large area of 5-6 hectares and surrounded by a ditch, probably a defensive moat, five or six metres wide. The houses were circular, built of mud and wood with overhanging thatched roofs. They sat on low foundations. There appears to be communal burial areas.[5]
Banpo is the type site associated with Yangshao Culture. Archaeological sites with similarities to the first phase at Banpo are considered to be part of the “ Banpo phase” (7th millennium BCE) of the Yangshao culture. Banpo was excavated from 1954 to 1957 and covers an area of around 50,000 square metres.
The settlement was surrounded by a moat, with the graves and pottery kilns located outside of the moat perimeter. Many of the houses were semisubterranean with the floor typically a metre below the ground surface. The houses were supported by timber poles and had steeply pitched thatched roofs.
According to the Marxist paradigm of archaeology that was prevalent in the People's Republic of China during the time of the excavation of the site, Banpo was considered to be a matriarchal society; however, new research contradicts this claim, and the Marxist paradigm is gradually being phased out in modern Chinese archaeological research.[6] Currently, little can be said of the religious or political structure from these ruins from the archeological evidence.[5][7]
The site is now home to the Xi'an Banpo Museum, built in 1957 to preserve the archaeological collection.[8]
See also
Footnotes
- ^ Climate Change and Desertification with Special Reference to the Cases in China. International Year of Planet Earth, 2010, 177-187
- ^ Crawford GW. 2006. East Asian plant domestication. In: Stark. M, editor. Archaeology of East Asia. London: Blackwell Pub- lishing. p 77–95
- ^ http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~tcrndfu/articles/china%20overview%20pre.pdf
- ^ Yong Meng, Hu-Qin Zhang, Feng Pan, Zhou-De He, Jin-Ling Shao, and Yin Ding 2011 Prevalence of dental caries and tooth wear in a Neolithic population (6700–5600 years BP) from northern China. Archives of Oral Biology Article in Press
- ^ a b Ching et al., Francis D.K. (2007). A Global History of Architecture. New York: John Wiley and Sons. pp. 8–9. ISBN 0-471-26892-5.
- ^ The Chinese Neolithic: Trajectories to Early States, p.11
- ^ Lu et al. Earliest domestication of common millet (Panicum miliaceum) in East Asia extended to 10,000 years ago Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2009 May 5; 106(18): 7367–7372
- ^ http://www.chinamuseums.com/ban_po.htm
References
- Allan, Sarah (ed), The Formation of Chinese Civilization: An Archaeological Perspective, ISBN 0-300-09382-9
- Chang, Kwang-chih. The Archaeology of Ancient China, ISBN 0-300-03784-8
- Liu, Li. The Chinese Neolithic: Trajectories to Early States, ISBN 0-521-81184-8
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