CHINA ARQUEOLOGIA golden-age-chinese-archayeolog

25
Painted pottery pan basin
Height 8.8 (3 V 2 ), diam. 37 (14 ! / 2 )
Late Neolithic Period, Taosi Longshan Culture
(c. 2500-2000 BCE)
From Taosi, Xiangfen, Shanxi Province
The Institute of Archaeology, CASS, Beijing
The Taosi cemetery is remarkable for its lavishly
furnished elite burials, and it is from one of these
that the present earthenware basin was recovered. 1
Its painted decoration, consistent with the other
ceramics in the exhibition from this site, was
not applied until after the vessel had been fired.
It shows around the sloping inner surface a red
serpent, seen against a jet-black ground, which
uncoils clockwise from a bulge at the vessel's center.
Two rows of scales, half red and half in black
reserve, extend the full length of its body in slightly
staggered alignment, creating a checkerboard
effect. The head, marked by a tiny black eye, shows
two lappet-shaped appendages above and below,
and a long dentated snout and lower jaw. The pinnate
sprig emanating from between the teeth is a
puzzling aspect of the image, which must once have
served as an important key to the figure s symbolic
meaning. The serpent is encircled by a band of red
paint around the upper edge of the wall and the
canted rim.
The serpent motif in China reaches far back
in history, but it occurs infrequently before the
Anyang period. It makes its first, and so far unique,
appearance during the early Neolithic, in the form
of an eared or crested serpent painted on the
shoulder of a hu from the Banpo level at Beishouling,
Baoji, in Shaanxi province, dating to the fifth
109 | TAOSI LONCSHAN CULTURE