China Exclusive: Archaeologists Unearth Earliest Manmade Cave Houses

[Bianca]

                       China Exclusive: Archaeologists unearth earliest man-made cave houses 
 
 




www.chinaview.cn 
2009-01-
by Xinhua writers
Fu Shuangqi,
Feng Guo and
Zuo Yuanfeng
XI'AN, Jan. 25
(Xinhua)

-- Archaeologists have unearthed the earliest man-made cave houses and privately-owned pottery workshops in China which date back 5,500 years.

    After four years of excavation, a row of 17 cave houses were found on a cliff along the Jinghe River in northwest China's Shaanxi Province, Wang Weilin, deputy director of the Shaanxi Archaeology Institute and chief archaeologist of the excavation, told Xinhua.

    They were built between 3,500 to 3,000 BC, near the Yangguanzai village of Gaoling county, 20 km away from the provincial capital Xi'an.

    Wang said the row of houses are within a 16,000-square-meter site which is being excavated.

    The cave houses belonged to a late Neolithic culture named Yangshao. It originated in the middle reach of the Yellow River and was considered a main origin of Chinese civilization. Yangshao is best known for red pottery ware with painted patterns and animals.

    Each cave house, with an area of about ten square meters, was divided into two rooms. One was dug into the cliff side, the other, possibly made of wood and mud, was built on the outside of the cave, Wang said.

    Archaeologists also found pottery kilns and caves to store pottery beside the houses as well as pottery wares, fragments and tools.

    "Most of the cave houses had a pottery kiln beside it. We believe these cave houses were homes to families of pottery makers," Wang said.

    In previous excavations of Neolithic settlements in China, one pottery kiln was usually used by all families, he said. "Here we found the earliest evidence that a certain group of people were specialized in making pottery, a sign of division of labor."

    Caves storing pottery also show private ownership of property had emerged, Wang added.

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North of the cave houses, archaeologists also discovered sections of a moat averaging six to nine meters wide.

    Pottery unearthed from the moat's bottom showed it also belonged to the Yangshao culture from between 4,000 to 3,500 BC.

    "To dig it, lots of laborers must have been mobilized. Without an effective social mechanism, it would be hard to build a project like this," Wang said.

    A area covering 245,000 square meters inside the moat, equal to about the size of 46 American football fields, has not been unearthed.

    "We haven't excavated the settlement inside the moat but its scale was seldom seen at this age," Wang said.

    "As far as I know, the area inside the moat could be the largest and best preserved among settlements of this age," said Prof. Yan Wenming, a history expert with the School of Archaeology and Museology at Peking University.

    There were several other settlements of the same age nearby the discovery, but they were much smaller.

    "This one was very much likely to be an ancient town," said Wang.

    Archaeologists divide the Yangshao culture into three stages: between 5,000 to 4,000 BC, the middle period from 4,000 to 3,500 BC, and the one from 3,500 to 3,000 BC.

    "We know little about how people lived and were related in the middle stage. The discovery of this settlement offers a very rare and valuable chance to study this stage," said Chen Xingcan, deputy director of the Institute of Archaeology under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).

    Early Yangshao settlements have mainly been found in Shaanxi, but during the middle stage people spread to nearly half of what's considered today's China. Discoveries have been made in the north near the Great Wall, south to the Yangtze River, east to Shandong Province and west to Gansu and Qinghai provinces, Wang said.

    "This was the first time for cultural integration and might have laid the foundation for today's China. But we still don't know how this happened and why," he said. "We think this settlement is very important to exploring human society at this critical stage."

    The finding at the Yangguanzai site was selected one of the six major archaeological findings of 2008 by the CASS last week.

    Yangshao culture was named after its first settlement at Yangshao village of Henan Province neighboring Shaanxi. It was discovered by Swedish archaeologist Johan Gunnar Andersson and his Chinese colleague Yuan Fuli in 1921.