China Neolithic Era Banpo and Longshan cc.

In China, during the Neolithic period, people were initially migratory and then began to settle and manipulate agriculture. Pottery and textiles were the major products of the Neolithic period and we can see that they were developing at around the same time as the rest of the world was developing their writing systems and their major architectural forms. So China is really kind of lockstep in terms of the development of civilization and the development of their society. You can see that as they develop over time that, especially in the Shang Dynasty, that a lot of the same things are happening in the Near East and also in Greece at the same time as they are happening in China. The two main cultures that we're going to be discussing settled near the Yellow River, the Yanshao Painted Pottery Culture and the Longshan Black Pottery Culture. If pottery is found in another region, another geographic region nearby, it's still named after these sites if they are very close in style. These names are the names of these contemporary areas, but how they are used is to name the styles. The geographic cities or areas where they are known now are what the pottery forms are named after. Yanshao culture was founded or is based around Banpo, the Banpo region. Their basic way of surviving was fishing, agriculture, and hunting and the geographic region was divided into three areas. There was an area for pottery and kiln production, living areas, and grave sites. The houses that they lived in were fairly simple homes, often dug a little bit into the earth. They had simple timber roofs and mud walls and were based in several forms, round forms, square forms, and are often a lot like the housing that we see in the area of the Northwest Coast in the United States. However, some of the homes were a little bit more simple and they used simple grass to cover the timber roofs that they had designed. The pottery that we're looking at was not made using a potter's wheel and that's kind of significant. The way that they made this pottery was using the coiling method. You probably had used this when you were a kid. The pottery themselves or the pottery itself was decorated using something called ongobe or slip. The designs that were painted with the ongobe or slip are based somewhat in nature. We see fish forms and we also see a little head form or a little face form, which could have been a shaman's face and we see it surrounded by some kind of fish. An interpretation of the shaman's face is with these two little fish earrings hanging off of it, is that it was possibly either jewelry that a shaman or some sort of priest was wearing or it demonstrates a relationship as to having some sort of control over the natural elements. We see other examples of it on other pots, on the exterior, and it probably is very closely related to things that we saw, for instance, in the Anasazi culture and other cultures where the Northwest culture, where they depicted things that were naturally occurring in their environment, but they also depicted important religious concepts or at least some sort of leader. You could probably relate this somewhat to the Hamatsa in the Northwest coast of the United States of the Americas. The site that they dug had quite a few pots and some of the sites that they have excavated, and this is an image of one of the excavations, they actually have the excavation housed inside a building, a sort of warehouse now. They found quite a few pots buried into the houses and these were pots that were used for everyday use. They also had some grave sites. The pots that were buried in the homes have a very different look and a different function. For instance, this earthenware amphora, it's pretty cool. You would float it in the water and what would happen is the shape of it would make it float until it actually filled with water and then it would become bottom heavy and tilt up and then you could pull it out of the water. It was probably attached by the two handles with some sort of rope so it would be easy to pull it out of the water. The term amphora, just incidentally, is one of those terms that's used to describe anything that can be carried by two handles. It's actually a Greek term to describe a style of Greek pottery called amphorae. The grave sites were a bit different. They actually had sites where people were buried inside the ground and there were pots filled with food and other kinds of items. Apparently, it seems transcendent across a lot of cultures that you can take it with you. The idea being that if you have a grave site and you are burying somebody who you care about or who's important, you want to make sure and see to their needs in the afterlife. In the lower right-hand corner of one of these things, you can actually see one of the amphora that we were talking about. Other pots were found in these sites. These pots that they found in these other sites were actually quite a bit different than, I think, the ones that were used for everyday wear. They still have some of the same sort of elements where some of them are amphorae. You can see the two handles on either side. But they were highly decorated with this Ongobre slip. Just as an aside, Ongobre slip, E-N-G-O-B-E, or slip, S-L-I-P, is just watered-down clay that when you paint it onto pottery and you put it in a kiln, it oxidizes. So there's ferrous oxide and other kinds of metals that darken and react to the heat. And then they turn darker, and that's how you decorate the pot. And they're non-water-soluble, so it's a permanent kind of design. The jars that we see have these spirals on them. And possibly the designs on some of them are supposed to represent cowrie shells. They're supposed to represent also possibly the checkerboard pattern that you see on one of them is possibly to represent a field. There are some scholars who want to go deeper, sort of in a Freudian complex, and talk about the cowrie shells were often used as money, but can also somehow relate to female genitals, the depiction of female genitals. Most pottery bowls are bowls or vases, and simple shapes that we see in other cultures, and it's probably because that's the easiest shape to make, especially using the coil method. Most designs are based on organic forms. And these pots were probably used for funerary purposes because of the high degree of decoration, and the fact that you could look down on them from above. When they would be buried in the graves, you wouldn't need to decorate the bottom half of them, and a lot of them don't have decorations. Some of them have been found buried. They have been found in caches, meaning great groups of pottery. Some of them were found with human remains, but not that many. You could also talk a little bit about this design that we're seeing, this swastika-like form, and relate it also to the Navajo, in that they have swastika-like forms in their whirling log ceremony, and that this might relate somewhat to the concepts that we saw by Carl Jung, that we have this collective unconscious, or a gestalt, this database of imagery that we all use and we all share. So in comparison, an Anasazi or Navajo-style pot from a Neolithic-style culture that's very similar to Yangshao culture, has a lot of the same decorative forms, even including a sort of water-like form that some scholars interpret in the Chinese culture as being cowrie shells, but it could also represent just water forms. And we can see in the neck of the pot from Banpo, that we have another sort of form that looks like water. And in the Anasazi pot, we have the form that looks like water in the bottom register. And we also have some geometric forms near the top that represent something that's important to them that looks like kiva steps. The next culture that we're going to look at is the Longshan culture. And the Longshan is a little bit different. It's located further up the Yellow River, up from the site that we saw at Banpo. This pottery was actually made on a potter's wheel. Community at Longshan was a community that had permanent walled communities. They were sedentary. The burial sites indicate that it had a separation of classes. There are burial sites engraved with adorned bodies, and they even included some oracle bones in these sites. And oracle bones are kind of interesting items. These bones that they would inscribe characters, inscribe predictions, or at least questions on them. They would take a heated piece of metal or heat them in a fire until they cracked, and the way that they were cracked, people would read them, and then they would re-record what they found on the oracle bones to see if those recordings were accurate or not. And they actually saved some of them. And we'll look at these a little bit more in depth later. One of the things about the Longshan black pottery culture is that they were thrown on wheels, and they were very thinly spun. And so it makes for a much finer, more delicate kind of cup. And probably these cups were used as prestige items, as some sort of item that was not necessarily meant to be everyday use, however it does look like a wine glass. Longshan pottery is also not painted. The form itself is decorative. There are some carvings into it. And Banpo, in comparison, has a cruder technology. So it's called black pottery because the way that they fired it, the way that they applied a sort of glaze or slip to it, would have turned black in the fire. You can see that there's a large variation in form that's possible because of using the pottery wheel to turn it, that you can get a very symmetrical, even design. You can do these thin, long, delicate designs and flaring designs as well. When we zoom in a little bit on these kinds of cups, one of the interesting elements besides being thrown on a pottery wheel is that they actually have kind of incised designs inside the neck and up the actual body of the pot. So if we compare Longshan pottery on the left to Banpo pottery on the right, you can see there's a big stylistic difference. And probably part of this is there's a couple of thousand years between the two civilizations. If you recall, most Banpo pottery starts around 4000, and most Longshan pottery is around 2000 BCE.