Late painted pottery pot of Kukuten culture in the collection of the Piatra Niamuc Museum Courtesy of the author.
The Yangshao culture Xiyin pattern painted pottery unearthed in Shanxi Photo by reporter Li Yun of this newspaper Bright**.
The Majiayao cultural vortex painted pottery pot unearthed in Gansu Photo by reporter Li Yun of this newspaper Bright**.
Pottery single-handle cup unearthed from Kukuten culture Courtesy of the author.
The crescent pattern painted pottery pot unearthed in Yangshao Village Photo by reporter Li Yun of this newspaper Bright**.
Mutual learning among civilizations].
In 1922, the Swedish geologist Andersen discovered a kind of prehistoric remains that had never been seen before in China in Yangshao Village, Henan Province. How to accurately determine it?He was widely consulted. One of these European archaeologists was the German archaeologist Hubert Schmidt, who excavated the ruins of Kukutén in Romania. The following year, Andersen published the article "The Ancient Culture of China", and the Yangshao culture faience entered the field of vision of European archaeologists for the first time. Today, the similarities between the Yangshao culture and the Kukutten-Tripoliya culture in terms of cultural processes and general characteristics are still fascinating.
Chinese archaeologists excavated for the first time in Europe.
The Kukutten-Tripoliya culture is an important prehistoric archaeological culture in Southeastern Europe, with an absolute dating range of 5000-2800 BC. The culture is named after the excavations of two typical sites, Kukuten in Romania and Tripolije in Ukraine, and is known for its large number of beautifully crafted faience. The Kukutten-Tripoliya culture is widely distributed, stretching from the eastern foothills of the Carpathian Mountains in the west to the left bank of the Dnieper River in the east, covering an area of nearly 350,000 square kilometers.
From July to September 2019, the China-Romania joint archaeological project was carried out in Southeast Europe, the birthplace of European prehistoric culture, which was the first archaeological excavation carried out by Chinese archaeologists on European soil. The research team of the project is composed of more than 10 researchers from the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the Zhengzhou Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, the Institute of Archaeology of the Romanian Academy of Sciences, and the National Museum of Moldova.
The excavated site is located in the village of Dobjovac, south of the Romanian city of Iasi, about 70 kilometers northwest of the ruins of Kukutén. In 2019 and 2023, the joint archaeological team focused on exposing and cleaning up the collapsed piles of the four houses, and found relatively well-preserved ruins such as red clay houses, ash pits used to dispose of domestic garbage, and a large number of relics such as pottery shards, stone tools and bone tools, among which many painted pottery shards with exquisite ornamentation were found. The motif of ornamentation is dominated by the S-shaped and spiral patterns of red clothes and white color notes common in the early Kukuten culture. After a hundred years, Chinese archaeologists have been able to get a glimpse of Andersen's Kukuten culture from the painted pottery pieces excavated by their own hands.
In addition to the striking faience, the collapse and accumulation of red clay houses is the most common type of remains in the Kukuten culture and the main object of our archaeological excavations. These clay blocks were originally part of a house with wooden bone mud walls, and on the surface of most of the clay clods, semicircular or square wooden bone imprints are clearly visible. Its hard texture indicates that the house was once violently burned during the abandonment process. The load-bearing frame was made of wooden bones embedded in the mud of the grass, which was overwhelmed by ablation, and the entire house collapsed, resulting in the collapse of the red clay houses seen today. Usually, after the grass mud house catches fire, the soil turns into red clay, and the wood bones will form charcoal, but what is confusing is that no large pieces of charcoal have been found under the accumulation of red clay houses that have been exposed so far.
In fact, similar relics have also been found in some important sites of the Neolithic Age in China, such as the Guanmiaoshan site of Daxi culture, the Weichi Temple site of Dawenkou culture, the Dahe village site and Baligang site of Yangshao culture. However, in the past, insufficient attention was paid to such relics encountered in the site, and most of them were simply recorded and sampled as fragments of prehistoric buildings. In this Sino-Romanian joint excavation, we realized the complexity of the collapse and accumulation of red clay houses, and the seemingly ordinary red clay blocks actually contain extremely rich historical information, such as the building materials, construction technology, and the causes of the formation of abandoned and collapsed accumulations.
For this special archaeological remains, we have borrowed a set of effective working methods developed by our Romanian counterparts in long-term excavation practice. In order to record the wooden bone imprints on the red clay blocks to the greatest extent and restore the construction method of the wooden frame of the house, after extracting the red clay blocks, we will flip and assemble the red clay blocks on the sand table according to the grid, and then carry out 3D photography and computer modeling.
Faience: fascinating similarities.
A hundred years ago, Andersen's attention to the faience ornamentation of the Yangshao culture led him to quickly realize that the faience found in China may be as old as those found in European prehistoric sites. The yardstick on which he relied was the distinctive cultural element of faience. However, Andersen, who was born in geology, did not notice the particularity of cultural development, but copied the "uniformitarian theory" that he regarded as the benchmark in natural disciplines such as geology, paleoenvironmental science, and paleontology to archaeological research, which eventually led to his erroneous understanding that the Yangshao culture in China and the painted pottery culture in the West are homologous.
At present, although we have not found direct evidence of cultural exchanges between China and the West in the relics of the Kukuten culture period (4800BC-2800BC), the status of Kukuten culture in the historical process and some cultural characteristics are highly similar to those of Yangshao culture in the same period, which confirms the general law of the development process of human civilization.
For example, from the perspective of historical development stage, both are in the era of the transition from the late Neolithic to the Bronze Age. A small number of red copper products have appeared in the late Kukuten culture, while the late Yangshao culture is considered to be the beginning of the Chinese era of copper and stone use. The livelihood and economic forms of both are mainly dry-fed agriculture (wheat is the main type of Kukuten culture, and millet and millet are the main forms of Yangshao culture), and both livestock breeding (Kukuten culture is more focused on domestic cattle, while Yangshao culture is more pig-based) and hunting and gathering. Both have a well-developed pottery industry, the popular use of painted pottery, the stratification and differentiation within the settlement are not obvious, and the social status between individuals is relatively equal. The spatiotemporal expansion of the two is mainly driven by the continuous diffusion of people to the surrounding suitable agricultural areas, and the settlement layout is relatively regular, and large centripetal settlements are found. The construction method of the two houses is mainly wood, bone and mud walls, and when they are abandoned, they often produce the collapse and accumulation of red-clay houses on a settlement scale. However, in the more than 100 years since its discovery, the Kukuten culture has never found a large-scale, individually planned public cemetery around the settlement, which is very different from the Yangshao culture, which focused on burial rites.
As Andersen noted in his early years, there are indeed many similarities between the Kukuten culture and the Yangshao culture in faience. In the late period of Kukuten culture (3500bc-2800bc), some typical faience shows intriguing convergence with the faience of Majiayao culture (3100bc-2000bc) in northwest China in terms of vessel type and ornamentation. As a continuation of the development of the late Yangshao culture in northwest China, the Majiayao culture created the second peak of prehistoric faience art. The pair swirl pattern evolved from the popular pair of bird patterns in the Miaodigou period is a typical type of ornament in the early Majiayao culture, and this kind of ornamentation is also more common in the late Kukuten culture. In addition, the arc edge triangle pattern of the Miaodigou period and the concentric circle pattern of the early Majiayao period can also be found in the late Kukuten culture. In particular, a kind of oblique belly flat-bottomed straight-mouthed faience pot that appeared in the late Kukuten culture will be reminiscent of the typical curved belly faience pot of the temple ditch culture in terms of vessel type and color painting and composition.
The seeds of early cultural exchanges between China and the West were planted.
Although there was no direct contact between the Majiayao culture and the Kukuten culture, they both planted the seeds of vitality for the cultural exchanges between China and the West that began later.
At the end of its development (3000BC-2800BC), Kukuten culture underwent unprecedented social change. Some super-large centripetal settlements in the forest-steppe ecological transition zone have disintegrated under the stimulus of environmental changes, resulting in a large number of people originally engaged in agricultural production spreading eastward into the forest-steppe zone on the northern shore of the Black Sea. In the context of the climate turning dry and cold, the means of survival they rely on have gradually changed to animal husbandry based on herbivorous livestock such as cattle and sheep, and the mobility of people has been unleashed in unprecedented frequency and breadth. The interaction of people in adjacent regions produced a "relay race" effect, which accelerated the spread of metallurgy, thus making Eurasia gradually enter the Bronze Age from west to east. If the collapse of the Kukutsen culture objectively contributed to the spread of early metallurgy in Eurasia, then we can see that this turbulent front first arrived in northwest China about 800 years later. For example, at the site of Xichengyi in Zhangye, Gansu Province, copper artifacts were found, as well as copper ore, smelting slag, smelting furnace wall fragments, air blast pipes and stone fans, all of which are evidence of local copper smelting production.
By the early Iron Age, in the second half of the 2nd millennium BC at the latest, direct evidence of cultural exchange between the eastern and western ends of Eurasia was emerging. The Dobjovac site that we excavated showed no signs of large-scale human activity for a long time after the Kukutten period. It was not until about the mid-to-late 2000BC (1500BC-1000BC) that a group of early Iron Age ancestors settled here again. The main signs of activity left behind are ash pits with circular plans. By taking soil samples from these pits and flotation, we found a large number of carbonized millet grains. This is the first time that Chinese archaeologists have discovered the remains of early millet crops in Europe.
As one of the main crops of China's native origin and domestication, millet has the biological advantages of short growth cycle, cold tolerance and drought resistance, and is favored by many people with high mobility in the ecological marginal area. In the mid-to-late 2000 BC, as the climate in northern Eurasia turned arid, the earlier agricultural populations gradually began to become nomadic. The seasonal migration and mutual exchange of different groups of people in the east-west direction formed the "Prehistoric Silk Road". It was along this "prehistoric Silk Road" in Eurasia that millet originated in northern China was deliberately planted and spread through Central Asia and the Near East, and finally reached Europe. This inconspicuous grain of millet deservedly became a witness to the early cultural exchanges between China and the West.
On the other side of the Eurasian continent, at the latest in the early 2000 BC, the Majiayao culture horse factory type (2300BC-2000BC) continued westward along the Hexi Corridor to the Hami Oasis in eastern Xinjiang, and brought the cultural element of faience into Xinjiang, opening the cultural tradition of faience in this region for more than 1,000 years. More than 4,000 years ago, there was the earliest phenomenon of cross-regional cultural exchange that can be seen on archaeological evidence, which originated in the Near East, copper smelting technology, wheat crops, domesticated cattle and sheep, and many foreign cultural elements such as the head of the scepter, a symbol of power and prestige, began to gather in the Hexi Corridor. The westward expansion of Majiayao culture not only greatly expanded the development space of Chinese civilization, but also laid the foundation for the early cultural exchanges between the East and the West.
The stones of other mountains can be used to attack jade. Archaeological excavation and research on the prehistoric cultures of Southeast Europe, which are thousands of miles away, can not only give full play to the disciplinary advantages of archaeology in cross-regional and long-term comparison, but also provide a rare extraterritorial perspective for us to better understand the uniqueness of China's prehistoric culture. When we compare the Chinese civilization with the world civilization with the stars of the world, we can understand why "the scenery is unique here".
Author: Wen Chenghao, Assistant Researcher, Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social SciencesXin Yingjun is a research librarian of Zhengzhou Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology).