KEIGHTLEY, D. N. (1990). "Early Civilization in China: Reflections on How it Became Chinese" a P. S. ROPP. Heritage of China. Contemporary Perspectives on Chinese Civilization, Berkeley, University of California Press: 15-54.

Neolithic China

Archaeological evidence provides considerable reason for thinking that distinctions between rich and poor, male and female, and the powerful and the weak were emerging in China by the fourth and third millennia B.C. Not only did grave goods become more abundant, but the general egalitarianism of the early Neolithic burials was replaced by marked discrepancies in energy input, wealth, and ritual care in later burials. Similarly, certain houses and certain village areas begin to reveal differentiation in the goods available to the living. The presence of grave goods—which, although finely made, were generally items of daily life— presumably indicates a belief in some kind of postmortem existence.

The burial, particularly in Eastern sites, of superbly made polished stone and jade tools, such as axes and spades, whose edges reveal no traces of use, also indicates that status differentiation was prolonged beyond the grave. These objects suggest that certain members of the society had been the possessors of symbolic, rather than working, tools— emblems of the owner’s power to control the labor of others, both in this life and in the next. There were already by about the mid fourth millennium B.C. some people in China whose hands were not as dirty as those of others.

The Late Neolithic saw the emergence of scapulimancy and plastromancy, methods of divination in which the scapulas of animals (usually cattle) or the plastrons of turtles were scorched or burnt, the diviner interpreting the resulting cracks to foretell good or ill fortune. The presence of some of these "oracle bones" in cemetery areas suggests that the living, by cracking oracle bones, were attempting to communicate with the dead. One may assume that a consistently successful diviner would have acquired increased political authority, an authority supported by his powerful kin, both living and dead.

The Neolithic Chinese treated their dead with remarkable and characteristic assiduity. Corpses were buried in orderly rows, oriented to certain compass directions depending on the area of China in which they had lived. This orderly layout presumably reflected expectations of social order among the living. The corpses were also generally buried in the supine-extended, a practice that required more labor for the digging of the burial pit than, for instance, a flex burial. The log construction of coffin chambers in certain Eastern burials, particularly at the Dawenkou site in Shandong, or of tomb ramps in the northwest is a further indication of the labor expended on mortuary concerns.

The practice of collective secondary burial, which, although never dominant, flourished in the Central Plains and the Northwest during the fifth millennium, is particularly revealing. The cleaning away of the flesh and the careful reburial of the bones—frequently arranged in the standard supine-extended posture of the primary burials, and with skulls oriented to the prevailing local direction implies the ability to mobilize labor resources for the collective reinterment of up to seventy or eighty skeletons in one pit. It also implies that the dead must have been kept alive in the minds of their survivors during the period of months, if not years, between primary and secondary burial.

Other mortuary rituals were employed. The placement of some of the jars and goblets in Neolithic burials, for example, suggests the existence of farewell libations by mourners as the grave was being filled in the precarious, tall-stemmed black goblets of the East - whose fine, eggshell-thin construction itself suggests some special ritual function - may have been used for the consumption of millet wine at the time of interment.

One of the most remarkable of all Neolithic burials is found at the Liangzhu culture which gives ample evidence of ritual activity: the corpse had been placed atop ten jade pi disks that had been burned; the body had then been surrounded by a variety of jade and stone tools and ornaments, including a perimeter of twenty-seven jade cong tubes; and five of the twenty-four jade bi in the burial had been deliberately broken in two and placed in different parts of the grave. Given the difficulty of working with jade, a material that has been described as "sublimely impractical," the presence of large numbers of finely carved jade bi and cong in other Lower Yangtze burials of the third millennium - they have never been found in the housing remains - is further indication of the way in which the labors of the living were exploited for the service of the dead.

Some burials also contained victims: animal and, occasionally, human. Human sacrifice was not widespread in the Neolithic, but there is evidence that a small number of people were accompanying others in death, further evidence of the kinds of payments the living were constrained to offer the dead . The presence of an occasional tool by the side of the victim indicates, at least in the later sites, that a seryant in this life was to continue as a servant in the next life. Ties of obligation and servitude were so strong that they persisted after death.