中國田野考古與史前學

Archaeological Fieldwork and Prehistory in China

10.29708/JCS.CUHK.197612_8(1).0015

鄭德坤(CHENG TE-K'UN)

中國文化研究所學報

8卷1期（1976 / 12 / 01）

1 - 24

繁體中文

Prehistory is a modern science and it is quite new in China. Being a people deeply conscious of their history the Chinese did not feel that they had a prehistoric past; the past is their history. The excavation and study of prehistoric remains were not introduced until the 1920s. However, in spite of all the revolutionary upheavals and foreign aggressions and the political pressures and ideological struggles in recent decades, modern archaeology in China has managed to develop in steady strides and maintain a smooth continuity in personnel and organization as well as in training and research. The general tendency in this field has been one of industry, purposefulness and progress. The most spectacular results may be seen in the establishment of a prehistory for China. Apart from giving a brief survey of the field works and research activities, this paper presents a summary of the prehistory of China in tabular form. It may be worthwhile to enumerate the outstanding conclusions in this resumé. It is quite well-established now that the development of man and culture in China was indigenous and continuous. Way back in the Middle Pleistocene about half a million years ago China was populated by the Sinanthropus, a Homo erectus. He was already well adapted to the various environments of the land, ranging from the limestone caves near Peking and the grassy slopes around Sian to the forest region northwest of K'un-ming. Peking Man was the inventor of tire. His principal food was venison, but he also enjoyed a vegetable diet. He used chopping tools which were crude and heavy. By the end of the Middle and the beginning of the Upper Pleistocene, some 200,000 years ago, the inhabitants of China were Homo neanderthalensis. They had a wide distribution in all the three main river basins in China Proper. Some of them roamed far and wide into the steppe region to the north and began to use smaller stone implements which may be taken as a proto-type of the Gobi microliths in later times. In the Upper Pleistocene, around 100,000 years ago Homo sapiens appeared all over China. Morphologically the early man began to acquire some racial affinities, particularly the mongoloid features, and culturally there were different traditions in the various geographical regions. The main activities however, were concentrated in the middle and lower Huangho where remains of some admixtures of cultures were found. It was towards the end of this stage that a number of neolithic features began to evolve. Arrow-making, basketry, polishing and perforating techniques were all in service. Early neolithic culture was practised by Modern Man in the Holocene. It was characterized by a somewhat sedentary way of life and the use of pottery. The industry was basically mould-cast which was responsible for the cord or basket impressions on the outer surface of the ware. Radiocarbon dating confirms that the pottery was invented in China no less than 10,000 years ago. However, a full-fledged neolithic culture was not established until around 5,000 B.C. By this time China Proper was already teeming with busy life. The early Proto-Chinese were hundred percent tillers of the soil. They lived in villages and drew their sustenance mainly from what they could grow. So far thousands of these ancient villages have been investigated and a number of the important localities thoroughly excavated. Some of them are surprisingly large and must have harboured a considerable population. The development of this new way of life may be traced to Chung-yuan, the Central Plain in the Huangho basin. A close understanding of the land and climate, flora and fauna, soil and resources might have led to the introduction of the new era. People began to settle down with a well-developed culture, gradually switching to food production by adopting plant cultivation and animal domestication. Conditioned by the geographical environment, the late neolithic culture assumed from the very beginning a distinctive pattern quite original in many respects. The typical prehistoric culture flourished in the Central Plain for no less than three millennia. The progress is now represented by four stages, namely Yang-shao, Ch'ü-chia-Iing, Lung-shan, and Hsiao-t'un. The last may be taken as Proto-Shang, which set the foundation for the establishment of the Shang dynasty. Their succession in the Central Plain is recorded by many stratigraphic sequences. Together with the Gobi culture, they sometimes existed side by side for a considerable length of time. The process of mixing and amalgamation was a long and complicated affair. The late neolithic site in different parts appear almost always in mixed form with various degrees of admixture, sometimes with traces of palaeolithic elements as well. There were many types of mixed cultures each in various levels of development. The rivalry and co-existence provided much inspiration to stimulate progress. The villages rapidly developed into towns and walled cities. The localization of corporate kinship groups and their domination of industrial growth paved the way for the concentration of powerful clans into a metropolis which began to impose its rule over the country side. The Shang people were probably the first to take advantage of this movement, marking the beginning of a dynastic tyer of political power. In practically every respect all the Shang cultural traits stemmed directly from some neolithic basis. They include agriculture and domestication of animals, architecture and city building, preparation of food and cooking, ancestral worship and scapulimancy, clan and kinship system, ceramics and jade, writing and art and many others. All these are fully substantiated with archaeological data. The fact that historical China had its roots planted in the prehistoric past is now firmly established. The methods of dating the prehistory of China include now several series of radiocarbon dates. The paper presents not only those recently published by the Institute of Archaeology in Peking, but also some given by the Taiwan archaeologists. The presentation of all these dates does not mean that each individual reading is absolutely free from error. Besides, the numbers are not sufficiently large enough to ensure accuracy in estimation. But it is interesting to note that a start along this line has been made and that as a whole they seem to fit into a pattern quite similar to the picture which had been formulated by archaeological works and comparative researches. Continued accumulation of radiocarbon dates will present the prehistory of China in a better light.