CHANG, K.C. (1986). The Archaeology of Ancient China. New Haven, Yale University Press.

The third millennium b.C, was the millennium of the Longshan Culture. The interaction sphere had by the Longshan period obviously been strengthened, and not only stylistic similarities in material culture but also comparable evolutionary trends in social organization and ideology are now very much visible throughout the sphere of interaction. This must mean that communication had become constant and intensive and that it spurred on interrelated changes in culture and society across regional borders. Let us take a quick took at the kind of innovations that sprouted everywhere and that, because of the similarities of style, must be interrelated:

1. Archaeologically: acceptable evidence of copper objects, mostly trinkets and small tools of no agricultural value, has been unearthed in Shandong, western Henan, southern Shanxi from archaeological horizons comparable in age. The finds do not suffice to point to a major metal industry as yet, but in light of what happened later on one must regard the Longshan metallurgy as worthy of note.

2. Industrially much more important is the extremely widespread use of potter’s wheels for the manufacture of ceramics. There was tremendous variation in the pottery wares of the various Longshan Cultures, but the overwhelming change from red to gray and the general decline of painted decoration must have been the result of a conscious choice on the part of the potters, who, armed with improved kilns and the wheel, must have represented a specialized profession in the Longshan society.

3. The stamped-earth construction technology and the construction of town walls using that technology are separate issues, but the town walls in Shandong, east Henan, north Henan, and west Henan indicate both the transmission of a technology and the rise of the necessity for defensive public works.

4. Related to the rise of defensive ramparts is the archaeological evidence of institutionalized violence. This takes two forms: evidence of raids or wars, such as the finds of skulls and bodies in a water well; and burials of possible ritual victims relating to the construction of chiefly or royal monuments.

5. There are several manifestations of rituals, especially ones closely tied to persons of high political status. The first is the role of some animals and birds in ritual art.

6. The cong tube, especially if associated with animals and birds, is a very distinctive ritual object manifesting a unique cosmology. Its discovery in Liangzhu on the coast and Taosu in the interior cannot be accidental; it indicates without question an interregional transmission of cosmology or even a spherewide substratum featuring that cosmology.

7. The virtually universal occurrence of scapulimancy among the Longshan Cultures is another manifestation of the spherewide communication or substratum of cosmology.

8. The archaeological evidence for violence and for ritual art on an institutiotional basis almost inevitably means a society featuring sharp political and economic divisions, and that is exactly what we find in the mortuary remains of many of the Longshan Cultures. We have already seen archaeological indications of social ranking in the mortuary remains of the Neolithic sites of the fifth and fourth centuries b.C. These trends accelerated and further intensified in the Longshan cemeteries. Furthermore, as the Shandong and Shanxi cemeteries show, the economic and political polarization appears to have taken place within the framework of the unilinear clans and lineages.

All of the above happenings are plainly indicated by archaeological evidence but they do not point to a single Longshan Culture. Instead, they indicate a series of interrelated changes in culture and society that took place within each of the regional cultures in the Chinese interaction sphere. From the point of view of each of the regional sequences, both the external interaction network and interior changes during a period of two thousand years were essential for its readiness, toward the end of the third millennium B.C., to step over the next threshold into the state society, urbanism, and civilization.