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This note is about the site of Shimao in northern Shaanxi.  It is dated to around four thousand years ago.  The architectural details alone are astonishing for that age and place, but there are so many other cultural riches, including sculpture and engraving, plus agricultural advances not found in central China till later.  It is only recently, within the last decade, that the site began to be excavated, and new discoveries are ongoing, so we can expect more important findings from Shimao.

Shimao (Chinese: 石峁; pinyin: Shímǎo) is a Neolithic site in Shenmu County, Shaanxi, China. The site is located in the northern part of the Loess Plateau, on the southern edge of the Ordos Desert. It is dated to around 2000 BC, near the end of the Longshan period, and is the largest known walled site of that period in China, at 400 ha.

The city was surrounded by inner and outer stone walls, in contrast to the rammed earth walls typical of Longshan sites in the Central Plain and Shandong. The walls were 2.5 meters thick on average, with perimeters of approximately 4200 m and 5700 m respectively, and feature gates, turrets and watch towers. The earliest site, the "palace centre", was a large stepped pyramid based on a loess hill which had been reworked to make 11 platforms. Each of these was reinforced by stone buttresses. At the top of this pyramid palaces of rammed earth were built. The inner city contained a stone-walled platform, interpreted as a palatial complex, and densely packed residential zones, cemeteries and craft workshops. Unusual features include jade embedded in the city walls, possibly to provide spiritual protection, and paintings of geometrical patterns on the inner walls. Many human skulls were found under the city gate, suggesting ritual sacrifices during construction.

Developments such as bronze working, wheat, barley, sheep, goats and cattle seem to appear here earlier than elsewhere in China, showing that its inhabitants were communicating with Western Eurasian people across extensive trade networks.

(source)

I have written about Shimao informally before, but the more we keep finding out about it, the more I come to believe that it is the most important archeological site in China from before the beginning of our era.

Now we are indebted to Jin Xu for his Tweetstream that presents so many fascinating details about Shimao, with more than a dozen stunning photographs (look at them carefully, for they reveal astonishing features of the culture at the site).

Jin Xu's observations are highly perceptive, e.g.:

As Ralph E. Turner puts it, "almost nothing is known about Chinese architecture before the age of Qin (3rd c BC)," because dominant building materials had been rammed earth &timber. But at Shimao, we see a stone city with monumental structures which look like stepped pyramids.

Shimao reveals a lost culture that seemed to have the most advanced building & manufacturing techniques of the time, highly sophisticated ritual& artistic activities. However, it is located far away from the Central Plains where Chinese civilization has been assumed to emerge.

While the terracotta soldiers suggest contacts between China & the rest of Eurasian world at the beginning of the imperial age, the Shimao city might show such contacts already started at the very beginning of Chinese civilization.

Shimao is of phenomenal importance, not just for the history of China, but for the history of civilization of the whole of Eurasia during the crucial late Neolithic and early Bronze Age.

Do stones and bones speak?  I think so.

 

Research report

Li Jaang, Zhouyong Sun, Jing Shao, and Min Li, "When peripheries were centres: a preliminary study of the Shimao-centred polity in the loess highland, China", Antiquity, 92.364 (August 22, 2018), 1008-1022.

Abstract

Chinese civilisation has long been assumed to have developed in the Central Plains in the mid to late second millennium BC. Recent archaeological discoveries at the Bronze Age site of Shimao, however, fundamentally challenge traditional understanding of ‘peripheries’ and ‘centres’, and the emergence of Chinese civilisation. This research reveals that by 2000 BC, the loess highland was home to a complex society representing the political and economic heartland of China. Significantly, it was found that Later Bronze Age core symbols associated with Central Plains civilisations were, in fact, created much earlier at Shimao. This study provides important new perspectives on narratives of state formation and the emergence of civilisation worldwide.

 

Selected readings

• "The importance of archeology for historical linguistics" (5/1/20)
• "The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe" (1/6/09)
• "Archeological and linguistic evidence for the wheel in East Asia" (3/11/20)
• "Of horse riding and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (4/21/19)
• "Horses, soma, riddles, magi, and animal style art in southern China" (11/11/19)
• "Indo-European 'cow' and Old Sinitic Reconstructions: awesome" (1/16/20)
• "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (3/8/16)
• "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 2" (3/12/16)
• "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 3" (3/16/16)
• "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 4" (3/24/16)
• "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 5" (3/28/16)
• "Of armaments and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 6" (12/23/17) — particularly pertinent, and also draws on art history as well as archeology
• "An early fourth century AD historical puzzle involving a Caucasian people in North China" (1/25/18)
• "Of shumai and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (7/19/16)
• "Of felt hats, feathers, macaroni, and weasels" (3/13/16)
• "Of dogs and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (3/7/18)
• David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2007).

 

May 11, 2020 @ 5:49 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and archeology

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