CHINA ARQUEOLOGIA golden-age-chinese-archayeolog

THE TAOSI
LONGSHAN
CULTURE
When the cemetery at Taosi was first uncovered, the startling riches discovered there gave rise to
speculation that this was a site of the legendary Xia, referred to in historical texts as the predecessors
of the Shang. 1 But much of the material excavated at Taosi bears little direct relation to
Erlitou, now considered by many archaeologists as a Xia capital city, and, moreover, the radiocarbon
dates for Taosi place it somewhat earlier, in the final centuries of the third millennium BCE.
The Taosi site, north of the Yellow River in the Xiangfen region of southern Shanxi
province, was excavated between 1978 and 1985. Although remains from this same culture have
been reported from numerous other locations in the area, only Taosi has been extensively excavated
and published in any detail. Traces of dwellings, storage pits, and kilns have been noted,
but the archaeological investigation has focused on the cemetery alone. Many tantalizing questions
therefore remain about this distinctive late Longshan culture.
The cemetery itself, however, is of great importance. It is estimated to contain several
thousand burials, of which nearly a thousand have already been excavated. The large number
of burials suggests that the area was densely populated, and the fact that many of the graves
overlap indicates that the cemetery was in use for a long period of time. Archaeologists have
classified the burials according to their size. The majority of graves were small, measuring
roughly two meters in length and a half to one meter in width, and for the most part they were
unfurnished. The medium-size tombs, a little more than two meters long and a meter wide,
numbered fewer than a hundred. They contained wooden coffins and a variety of burial objects,
such as pottery and wooden vessels, jade axes, cong, and personal ornaments, as well as pig
mandibles. One of the medium-size tombs (M 3296) yielded the surprising discovery of a small
cast copper bell. The bell is assumed to have been made in a place other than Taosi because, so
far, no evidence of either smelting or metalworking has come to light in the vicinity of the site.
At least four of the objects in the exhibition come from the large tombs, which are the
burials of the elite members of the Taosi community. 2 As far as can be ascertained, the large
burials, generally about two meters in length and two to three meters wide, are exclusively those
of adult males. The coffin, fashioned of wooden planks, was placed at the center of the tomb,
surrounded by as many as nearly two hundred burial objects. One of the most lavishly provided
of the tombs at Taosi, M 3015, gives us a sense of the wealth and variety of objects destined for
an elite burial. In all, the tomb contained 178 objects, including 14 pottery vessels, 23 wooden
objects, 130 items of jade and stone, and n bone implements. Among the pottery vessels were
examples of handsomely shaped corded gray-ware containers, and even a small ceramic stove,
all of which are the recognizable descendants characteristic of the older Miaodigou II culture
that once thrived in this area. The tomb also yielded a small number of painted earthenware
vessels, including a hu (cat. 26a). 3
Even more remarkable for the very fact of their preservation were a number of wooden
objects, such as caskets and vessels. Some of the wooden vessels, like those from other tombs,
1O6 | LATE PREHISTORIC CHINA