Chapter 8 Section 7 Hemudu Site and Liangzhu Culture Altar

The Hemudu site is located in the northeast of Hemudu Village, Yuyao County, on the south bank of Hangzhou Bay. In 1973, a rice farming cultural relic completely different from the original culture in the Yellow River Basin was discovered here, dating as early as 7,000 years ago.This discovery has changed the traditional view that only the Yellow River Basin is the cradle of ancient Chinese culture. Different from the Bandi cave dwellings in the Yellow River Basin, the 7,000-year-old buildings found at the Hemudu site are wooden stilt-style houses with piles and slabs higher than the ground.At that time, the construction of this kind of house had used joinery techniques such as mortise and mortise, and the invention of dovetail tenon, tenon with pin holes and tongue-and-groove board marked the outstanding achievements of woodworking technology at that time.The largest stilt-style house found has an indoor area of ​​more than 160 square meters, which is divided into several small rooms and has a front porch aisle.The stilt-style building is one of the important building forms in the area south of the Yangtze River in China, and the Hemudu site is the earliest discovery of this building form.

Rice was the main cultivated crop at that time.Paddy, rice husks, stems and leaves are generally found in residential sites, and their mixed accumulations are 20-50 cm thick, and the thickest part is more than one meter.After identification, it mainly belongs to the cultivated rice indica subspecies late rice type rice.The representative paddy field farming tools found are mainly bone shovels. There are hundreds of them. They are made of deer and buffalo shoulder blades. , stone knives, rice pounding wooden pestle and other tools.The livestock breeding industry, which is dependent on agricultural settlements, also has a certain scale.Skeletons of pigs and dogs are commonly found in ruins, and the images of pigs are also used as symbols of auspicious harvests on pottery, or made into pottery models.In addition, the livestock raised may also include buffalo.

At that time, there were many kinds of handicrafts. In addition to wood and pottery, there were bone ware and weaving and weaving.The original waist loom may have been used for weaving, and the reed mat fragments found were weaved with two warps and two wefts.The bone wares produced are widely used in production and daily life. Among them, the butterfly wares engraved with the images of two birds facing the sun, the phoenix-shaped daggers, and the small cups with silkworm patterns, etc., show the exquisite art at that time.The wooden bowl coated with raw lacquer is the earliest lacquerware discovered in China so far.

The rich and colorful remains of rice farming, livestock breeding and handicrafts found at the Hemudu site show that the lower reaches of the Yangtze River had fully developed agricultural cultural achievements around 7,000 years ago, while the soil of the Liangzhu Culture discovered since 1986 The tombs, altars, central settlements and divine emblem jades further indicate that the primitive culture in this area had developed unprecedentedly 4,800 years ago, and the consciousness of theocracy and royal power of later generations has been initially and vividly reflected here. So far the largest artificial mound of the Liangzhu Culture has been discovered, located in the Fanshan mound on the south side of Zhishan Village, Yuhang County, Hangzhou City.The existing Fanshan mound is 90 meters long from east to west, 30 meters wide from north to south, and 4 meters high. The 11 tombs discovered in the western half of the Fanshan mound in 1986 were all large in scale, generally three meters long, two meters wide, and about 1.3 meters deep. There may have been wooden coffins painted with vermilion inside the tombs.Each tomb has a large number of funerary objects, including pottery, stoneware, ivory ware, lacquerware, jade ware, etc. Among them, jade ware, which was regarded as precious ritual objects by later generations, was unearthed in batches. tomb.Among the more than 3,200 pieces of jade unearthed, the types mainly include Cong [cong Cong], Yue, Bi, Huang, Pei, crown ornaments, tridents, Yuan, plaque ornaments, stick ornaments, belt hooks, beads, and birds, fish, Turtles, cicadas, etc., are mostly exquisite.Among them, jade wares such as cong, ax and bi were high-level ceremonial items at that time. The largest jade cong, 17.6 cm high and weighing 6.5 kg, is the crown of jade cong discovered so far.

What is thought-provoking is that on jade wares such as cong, axe, crown ornaments, and trident-shaped vessels, there are usually intricate patterns and decorations carved on them, the most important of which are complex and simple patterns of gods.The complete image of the statue has a wide mouth and teeth, a wide nose, round eyes and open eyes, a full head with a feathered crown, shrugged and akimbo, a belt around the waist, bird feet squatting, and the whole body is decorated with animal face patterns.Some of these statues are so small that they can only be observed with a magnifying glass, but the engraved lines are smooth and as thin as a hair, which shows that the jade carving skills in the Taihu Lake area reached a very high level 4,800 years ago.The pattern of the whole statue resembles a combination of god, man and animal face, showing an incomparably majestic and majestic spirit, full of the beliefs and reminders of Liangzhu people.The engraving of such statues on heavy objects such as jade cong and jade ax was carried by the upper-class nobles at that time, indicating that this statue may be the divine emblem of Liangzhu culture.

The altar cemetery of the Liangzhu Culture is located on Yaoshan Mountain, five kilometers northeast of the Fanshan Tomb.The altar has been carefully designed to be nearly square and slope-shaped, with a side length of about 20 meters and an area of ​​about 400 square meters. It is divided into three layers with different earth colors.The center is a red earthwork platform, the four sides are about 6-7.7 meters long, and the outer periphery of the red soil is a ditch filled with gray soil. Outside the gray soil ditch is a surrounding platform made of yellowish brown spot soil. The surface of the surrounding platform is paved with gravel, and the edges are stacked with gravel .This altar is made of multi-colored soil, which sets off the mysterious color of the place of worship, and creates a pioneering style of multi-colored soil altar architecture in later generations.

There are 12 tombs buried in two rows on the altar, and each tomb has a batch of jade wares. Among them, the tombs buried on the red earth platform in the center unearthed the most jade wares, some as many as 148 pieces (groups).This batch of jade wares is well-made, including mysterious jade cong, openwork jade crowns, crown decorations, tridents, etc., most of which are engraved with divine emblems, making people daunting; there are also jade axes and dragon heads that symbolize power. There are also decorations such as birds, huang, belt hooks, and high-grade articles such as jade-inlaid lacquerware.The owners of these tombs were probably priests or witches [xixi] who worshiped the sky, the earth, and the gods.

In addition to Fanshan and Yaoshan, the Liangzhu Culture Gaotai mounds and altar cemetery have been discovered so far, as well as Huiguan Mountain in Yuhang, Zhejiang, Dafendun and Yudun in Haining, Fuquan Mountain in Qingpu, Shanghai, Zhaoling in Kunshan, Jiangsu, and Luodun in Changshu. , Wujin Sidun and other places are almost all over the Taihu Lake area.The large-scale building sites corresponding to the large-scale high platform mounds and altar cemetery were discovered in the Mojiaoshan site in the center of the Liangzhu site group in Yuhang, Zhejiang. The Mojiaoshan site is a man-made platform-shaped foundation site, about 730 meters long from east to west, about 450 meters wide from north to south, covering an area of ​​more than 300,000 square meters, with an average height of three to five meters above the surrounding ground.So far, a large rammed earth foundation with an area of ​​more than 1,400 square meters and another rammed earth foundation with three rows of rather large pillar holes have been discovered on the site.The rammed earth foundation site is made of 9-13 layers of mud and sand at intervals, about 50 cm thick; there are three rows of large pillar holes with a row spacing of about 1.5 meters, and the diameter of the pillar holes is about 0.44-1.35 meters, and the depth is 0.21-0.72 meters. There are wooden pillar ash with a diameter of more than half a meter.In addition, a large square log several meters long was found, and a large number of adobes that had been burned were piled up in many places.These indicate that there were huge buildings of unprecedented scale built on this large platform site.Its tall and majestic image back then was daunting enough.What is amazing is that within about 12 square kilometers around the large platform site of Mojiaoshan, there are more than 40 ruins of various sizes, among which Yaoshan, Fanshan and Huiguanshan all exist around this central site.The large buildings on the Mojiaoshan site are likely to be the place where the supreme ruler of the Liangzhu people issued orders to the people.

The discoveries of Fanshan mounds, Yaoshan altar cemetery, and Mojiaoshan large-scale foundations and building sites have fully demonstrated the spiritual world and splendid material culture of Liangzhu people 4,800 years ago. has entered a period of high development.However, the disappearance of the Liangzhu cultural achievement is as dramatic as its discovery.In the nearly thousand years after the Liangzhu culture in the Taihu Lake area, no cultural relics comparable to the achievements of the developed Liangzhu culture have been found.Where did the cultural essence created by the Liangzhu people flow after the Liangzhu people?