Yangshao culture
Culture | Defunct
5000 BCE to 3000 BCE
The Yangshao culture is a Neolithic culture that exists extensively along the central Yellow River in China.
The Yangshao culture is dated from around 5000 BCE to 3000 BCE.
The culture is named after Yangshao, the first excavated representative village of this culture, which was discovered in 1921 in Henan Province by the Swedish archaeologist Johan Gunnar Andersson (1874-1960).
The culture flourishes mainly in the provinces of Henan, Shaanxi and Shanxi.
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The advances of the Neolithic Revolution continue to spread throughout the planet.
The cultivation of emmer wheat reaches Egypt shortly after 6000 BCE, and Germany and Spain by 5000 BCE, by which time highly organized social structures have formed.
Among the many such, notable examples include the Samarra culture in Mesopotamia, the Linear pottery culture in Central Europe, and various cultures in China: the Yangshao, the Hemudu, the Majiabang, the Daxi.
Humans had first appeared in the Balkans during the Pleistocene Epoch, a period of advancing and receding glacial ice that began about six hundred thousand years ago.
Once the glaciers had withdrawn completely, a humid climate prevailed in the area and thick forests covered the terrain.
Archaeological evidence indicates that the Balkan regions were populated well before the Neolithic Period (New Stone Age; about ten thousand years ago).
Agriculture, together with the domestication of food animals, spreads throughout the Crescent during the sixth millennium.
People are everywhere on the move: some groups, still using stone tools but with knowledge of agriculture, reach the Aegean from Anatolia or farther east and settle in parts of the Greek mainland and in Crete.
At some point in the early- to mid-sixth millennium, rising sea levels evidently breach the natural dam at the Bosporus that separates the Mediterranean Sea from the great freshwater lake occupying the basin of the modern Black Sea, three hundred and fifty feet below present sea level.
Fueled by the infinite waters of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, the seawaters rush in for the next year or so with the force and volume of multiple Niagaras, increasing the lake area by a third.
Surviving marine life is driven into the newly abbreviated estuaries of the Danube, Dniester, Dnieper, Don and Bug Rivers.
In flatter coastal areas, the shoreline may advance daily by as much as a mile.
Indo-European people are present in the Balkans beginning about 5500 BCE.
The Daxi culture centered in the Three Gorges region, around the middle Yangtze River, ranges from western Hubei to eastern Sichuan and the Pearl River Delta.
Nels C. Nelson discovered the site at Daxi, located in the Qutang Gorge around Wushan, Chongqing, in the 1920s.
Many key archaeological sites from the Daxi culture, including the site at Daxi, will be inundated or destroyed after the completion of the Three Gorges Dam in 2012.
Daxi sites are typified by the presence of dou (cylindrical bottles), white pan (plates), and red pottery.
The Daxi people cultivated rice extensively.
Daxi sites are some of the earliest in China to show evidence of moats and walled settlements.
The Daxi culture shows evidence of cultural interactions with the Yangtze River Delta region.
The white pan artifacts from the culture were discovered at several Yangtze River Delta sites, including the type-site at Majiabang.
Conversely, jade artifacts at Daxi sites show possible influence from the Yangtze River Delta region.
The Yangshao people of the cool and temperate Huang He valley grow millet as their principal grain.
Yangshao farmers employ primitive techniques of cultivation, moving their villages as the soils become exhausted.
Banpo (Pan-p'o) near present Xi'an (Sian) in central China, the type site associated with the Yangshao Culture, is located about five hundred and seventy-two miles (nine hundred and twenty kilometers) southwest of present Beijing (Peking) in a fertile, alluvial lowland at the foot of the Qing Ling Shan (Tsinling Shan) along the Wei, a tributary of the Huang He (Hwang Ho, or Yellow River).
Archaeological sites with similarities to the first phase at Banpo are considered part of the Banpo phase (5000 BCE to 4000 BCE) of the Yangshao culture.
Banpo was excavated from 1954 to 1957 and covers an area of around 50,000 square meters.
It contains the remains of several well-organized Neolithic settlements dating from approximately 4500 BCE.
It is a large area of five to six hectares and surrounded by a ditch, probably a defensive moat, five or six meters wide.
The houses were circular, built of mud and wood, supported by timber poles and and roofed with overhanging steeply pitched thatch.
They sat on low foundations; many of the houses were semisubterranean with the floor typically a meter below the ground surface.
There appears to be communal burial areas, with the graves and pottery kilns located outside of the moat perimeter.
More than one hundred dwellings surrounding a community center, a cemetery and a kiln are built around 4000 in Jiangzhai, a Banpo phase Yangshao culture village site to the east of Xi'an, where modern archaeologists have excavated the earliest copper artifacts in China.