Not since Richard Nixon sat in the Oval Office has the United States faced a more difficult decision about what to do with its space program. Last week, the chair of a presidential panel on human space flight told two congressional panels that NASA doesn’t have enough money to carry out the current plan to build a big rocket to take humans back to the moon and that the United States should consider other destinations and launchers.

Many lawmakers oppose any major deviation from the plan, laid out by President George W. Bush in 2004, to build a base on the moon using a new launcher system called Constellation. But the White House, eager to put its own stamp on a long-term exploration effort, is drawn to other options described in the panel’s executive summary released earlier this month (www.nasa.gov/offices/hsf/home/index.html). For President Barack Obama, who is expected to announce his space vision this fall, the challenge is to find a politically acceptable answer to the question of where NASA should send humans—and how.

The status quo is not a viable option, says Norman Augustine, the retired aerospace chief who chairs the committee set up this spring by the White House. The United States could “continue the present program until, frankly, it falls off a cliff due to lack of money,” he warned members of the House Science and Technology Committee during its hearing on 15 September. Staying the course, he explained, would require at least $3 billion more a year, although a lunar landing would be delayed far beyond the original target of 2020.

The Augustine panel—which is still working on its final report—has offered the Administration a series of choices rather than a single recommendation. They range from adding more money to the current Constellation program—a family of launchers that eventually could take astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit—to a rocket derived from space shuttle technology. NASA could also contract with private companies to provide rides into orbit. As for where to go, the moon could remain the destination, or NASA could shoot for a more flexible approach that might allow humans to orbit an asteroid or martian moon before eventually landing on Mars.

There is tentative agreement on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue that NASA should stick with the current plan to retire the three aging space shuttles by 2011 but prolong the life of the space station in orbit from 2016 to 2020. To service the station during that interim, NASA would initially buy Russian Soyuz vehicles and then use either commercially developed launchers or a new NASA rocket.

A coalition of aerospace companies, labor unions, former NASA officials, and Republican and Democratic politicians say that there’s nothing wrong with the Bush Administration’s space vision that more money couldn’t fix. Any alterations, they fear, would jeopardize the precarious support NASA now enjoys in Congress, they say, as well as thousands of skilled jobs. “There needs to be a compelling reason to scrap what we’ve invested our time and money in over the years,” said Representative Bart Gordon (D–TN), chair of the House science committee.

Legislators fear that building a different launcher and picking a new destination might eventually cost more than the current plan, which has been in the works for several years. “I have no interest in buying a pig in a poke,” says Gordon. So far, NASA has spent some $8 billion on Constellation, and the space agency plans its first prototype test at the end of October. Former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, who also testified before the House, came down strongly in favor of maintaining the Constellation-to-the-moon plan.

Sources close to NASA say that the new NASA administrator, Charles Bolden Jr., also favors the current plan. A former astronaut, Bolden was originally scheduled to testify as well but was dropped from the witness list because the Administration has yet to formulate a response to the Augustine options.

Bolden’s stance could put him at odds with White House officials hoping for a more exciting destination than the moon, which Americans reached 40 years ago. Administration officials are also worried that Constellation’s technical and financial troubles will grow in coming years.

Although Augustine refused to take sides despite pointed questioning at the hearings, he repeatedly cited the possibility of using commercial launchers and choosing a different destination. “The flexible path options are particularly interesting to me,” Augustine told the Senate commerce and science committee on 16 September.

Rather than landing on the moon, which requires an expensive lander system, astronauts could rendezvous with an asteroid to test how to move such a body out of harm’s way if it threatens Earth. Or humans on the asteroid-sized moons of Mars could teleoperate rovers on the martian surface. Those moons and asteroids exert only a fraction of the gravitational pull of a planet or Earth’s moon and therefore require far less fuel to land on and leave. That’s a key consideration in estimating costs.

The ultimate goal—not likely for 15 to 20 years—would be landing people on Mars. “There’s great merit to having some interim milestones along the way to Mars, where you can point to significant scientific and technological accomplishments,” Augustine noted. Although Bush’s vision included a string of interim steps, the committee in its public hearings found limited enthusiasm for an Apollo redux.

However, adding $3 billion a year to NASA’s $18 billion annual budget to carry out such missions—whether to the moon or elsewhere—doesn’t sit well with a lot of law-makers. “This is no longer the era of Apollo and the Cold War, where the payoffs for advancing the space and moon agenda are entirely clear,” said Senator Jay Rockefeller (D–WV), who chairs the Senate science panel. “Our country does not necessarily have the resources to do everything we want to do.”

The debate was not supposed to begin in earnest until after the Augustine panel submitted its final report. But Augustine, to the irritation of Administration officials, insisted upon satisfying the panel’s mandated 90-day study period and released an executive summary in early September.

White House officials say they need to digest the full report before drawing up a 5-year budget plan. That task falls to the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Office of Management and Budget, now hard at work. Their recommendation will then go to Obama, who is expected to announce a new policy by November.

“The president really has a major decision here,” said Senator Bill Nelson (D–FL), who flew on the space shuttle in 1985 and who played a key role in Obama’s selection of Bolden. “I believe [he] will make a bold stroke not unlike President Kennedy,” said Nelson, referring to Kennedy’s 1961 pledge to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

That announcement is expected to kick off a contentious debate next year in Congress. And Obama will need all of his political skills to convince both space supporters and deficit hawks that he’s on the right trajectory.

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The cradle of Chinese civilization was long considered to be the regionaround the middle Yellow River. But ancient and complex cultures fromfar-flung corners of the modern nation now tell a different story about the origin of Chinese culture

LIANGZHU, CHINA—Three years ago, a farmer who works the lush fields along the meandering Tiaoxi river, 200 kilometers southwest of Shanghai, decided to build a new house. This area around the town of Liangzhu has long been known as a center of Neolithic settlements, so Liu Bin of Zhejiang Province’s archaeological institute assembled a team to conduct routine salvage work. But rather than the postholes or earthen floors typically found at such settlements, the team instead encountered a carefully prepared foundation of stone blocks.

The blocks were part of a wall, now dated to 4300 years ago—and it was no simple enclosure. Further excavation revealed a massive perimeter of earth built on stone, with an average width of 50 meters, running in a rough circle for 7 kilometers and surrounded by a wide moat. The farmer lost his house site, but archaeologists gained a new appreciation for the complexity of this ancient culture. The enormous wall enclosed previously discovered earthen platforms, which extend over 30 hectares and are raised 10 meters above the low-lying plain. Although modest in comparison with the pyramids and ziggurats of this era in Egypt and Mesopotamia, the structures required an enormous amount of labor and skill. “To construct these large platforms and walls with simple tools, you would need 10,000 people over 2 years,” Liu estimates.

Even more astonishing than the engineering are the site’s location and age. Archaeologists long thought that Chinese civilization was born half a millennium later and 800 kilometers to the northwest along the central plains of the Yellow River. Wikipedia summarizes the classic view: “Chinese civilization originated in various city-states along the Yellow River in the Neolithic era.” Yet centuries earlier, Liangzhu was at the center of a sophisticated culture that included hundreds of settlements discovered in recent decades, stretching across the flat and fertile expanses as far as Shanghai. With finely worked jade ornaments, elaborate tombs, high platforms, and objects carved in an artistic and distinctive style, the Liangzhu culture appears separate from that of the Yellow River. In fact, goods and styles from this region, such as the fine jades, have been found as far west as the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, 3000 kilometers upstream, and were imitated across China for thousands of years.

Dramatic discoveries like those at Liangzhu have been repeated across China in the past 2 decades, challenging long-held views. From Manchuria in the north, to the Chengdu plain to the west, and to the coastal cities of the south (see map, p. 933), excavations are revealing a host of complex and distinct ancient cultures, each with its own artifacts and traditions. Liangzhu’s striking carved faces are one example; other cultures developed enormous bronze statues, large stone ceremonial complexes, and a golden, whirling sun motif.

Yellow River sites like Erlitou remain key to understanding the first true urban centers in China. But other, far-flung cultures also contain the seeds of Chinese traditions. “Before these astonishing finds, we were focused on the central plains,” says Wang Wei, director of the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. “Most of us accepted that the Yellow River was the origin of Chinese civilization. But as we’ve done more research, we have found other cultural areas as numerous as the stars in the sky.

… Now it is clear that the development and expansion of regional centers contributed to the formation of Chinese civilization.” And, he adds, communication and competition among those centers may hold the key to understanding how a common culture emerged.

In 2004, Wang’s institute began coordinating an ambitious multidisciplinary effort to chart this

in detail, by providing a more accurate chronology for sites and bringing to bear the latest methods for analyzing the past 25 years of finds. By drawing on researchers across China and collaborating with foreign scientists, Wang hopes to paint a more nuanced and data-driven view of the country’s ancient past while pushing China’s archaeological community toward the forefront of the field. But it is a formidable challenge, says archaeologist Lothar von Falkenhausen of the University of California, Los Angeles, who has long experience in China. “We don’t really know how the interactions took place, and they changed over millennia.”

Want a revolution

How China became China is no mere academic topic; it goes to the very heart of how the world’s most populous and economically vibrant nation sees itself and its role in the world. During much of the 20th century, archaeology was often used as a political tool, first as a boost to national pride in a country that felt dominated by Western powers and Japan. After the 1949 Communist revolution, suggestions that China’s evolution was strongly influenced by Western trade and technology became politically taboo. “Archaeology played a critical role in defining Chinese nationalism,” says Gary Crawford, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, in Canada. “But there’s been a real revolution in the profession in the past 20 years.”

That revolution has opened up previously off-limits topics, from the impact of the West (see p. 940) to regional diversity. After decades of isolation, Chinese archaeologists are increasingly setting aside formerly obligatory Marxist theory and drawing on modern techniques in gathering and interpreting data. Regional discoveries and institutes find a warm welcome—and funding—within provincial governments flush with tax revenues and eager to emphasize their unique contributions (see p. 936).

No one doubts that the plains around the middle Yellow River are where Chinese civilization coalesced around the middle of the 2nd millennium B.C.E., during what historians call the Shang dynasty (see timeline, p. 930). Legend speaks of an earlier dynasty called the Xia, but its existence remains controversial (see

p. 934). The vast archaeological and textual remains from the Shang reveal an elite with a rich court culture ruling over masses of millet and wheat farmers— the grains of choice in the cooler and drier north. Embroiled in frequent conquests, the Shang people used advanced weaponry such as horse-drawn chariots and took many prisoners from conquered regions. They also practiced human and animal sacrifice, worshipped a supreme god who dominated the forces of nature, and paid homage to their ancestors, who were seen as active participants in family life.

Many of these traditions and technologies echo through the next 3 millennia. The Shang set the stage for the expansion and collapse of central authority that repeatedly characterizes Chinese history. But there have been hints that this single region did not hold the whole story. More than 30 years ago, Su Bingqi of Peking University and K. C. Chang of Harvard University independently suggested that China’s civilization grew out of a complex interweaving of many regional cultures. Recent excavations back up these ideas. Indeed, prehistoric Chinese societies stretched across time and space, from the millet-farming-and-pig-raising Peiligang people in the north starting in 7000 B.C.E., to the 5000 B.C.E. Yangshao people near the Yellow River, who may have first experimented with silk. Many of the symbols of classic Chinese civilization, such as dragon motifs and the use of jade as a magical stone, appear to originate far from the central plains. Two cultures in particular—the Hongshan in the northeast, which flourished from 4500 B.C.E. to 2250 B.C.E., and the Liangzhu, which lasted from 3500 B.C.E. until 2250 B.C.E.—were setting the pace many centuries before the Shang. Indeed, the peoples of the mid–Yellow River area began to construct their first major settlement, called Taosi, at about the time the older cultures collapsed.

Finely carved jade, for example, first appears about 3500 B.C.E. during the Hongshan culture in today’s Liaoning and Inner Mongolia. There, researchers have found elaborate stone tombs containing numerous jade objects shaped like a phoenix and dragon—animals that later become central symbols in Chinese mythology.

“Jade is like gold in the West,” says archaeologist Elizabeth Childs-Johnson of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, who frequently works in China. “It is a major symbol of power” in China from the Neolithic to the modern era. The stone is also hard to work and therefore labor intensive. Whereas copper, bronze, and gold take center stage in the early civilizations of the West, these metals come relatively late to the East. Childs-Johnson argues that like precious metals in the West, jade production in China acted as a major stimulus for social evolution by defining an elite.

Recent excavations at Hongshan sites such as Niuheliang in the Liao River valley northeast of Beijing have focused mainly on remarkable burial structures and goods, including the jades. Eighteen elite graves dating to the centuries before 3000 B.C.E. have so far been unearthed, one with 20 pieces of carefully carved jade beads, disks, bracelets, hair tubes, and a plaque with fangs. The sacred and burial areas demonstrate “a level of cultural sophistication that is not duplicated elsewhere at this time in early China,” says Childs- Johnson. One partially excavated site near Niuheliang called Chengzishan includes a massive temple on a platform 165 meters wide and 900 meters long—nearly half the size of the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Researchers have so far found subterranean rooms, a life-size ceramic head of a female with inlaid nephrite-jade eyes, and sculptures of ox heads and birds.

Archaeologists have also increasingly found the material of daily life among the Hongshan people, including stone tools such as plow tips in standardized shapes; sophisticated kilns that fired black, gray, and red vessels; and unusual red-painted ceramic cylinders that served as building supports. And they say there are undoubtedly large numbers of undiscovered sites in this little-explored region, which Childs-Johnson thinks was “a prominent cultural center and player in the evolution of Chinese civilization.”

Researchers say they are just beginning to piece together the interactions among the Hongshan and other highly complex cultures that developed before the Yellow River culture or were largely independent of it. Was there trade, migration, diffusion, or warfare? Did the later cultures build on the earlier ones, or were they completely independent? New excavations may yield answers soon. “Northeast China is currently a hotbed of active field research that will illuminate both the nature of local cultural developments

and long-distance relationships,” says Harvard archaeologist Rowan Flad.

Long-distance contacts among cultures seem likely, but their complexity and extent remain elusive. For example, the Liangzhu culture, which emerged 1000 years later and 2000 kilometers southeast of the Hongshan heartland, may have drawn on the older society’s expertise in jade, but direct evidence is lacking. As early as the 1930s, Liangzhu archaeologists began to uncover numerous and varied jade objects of an even higher quality than those in the northeast.

The Liangzhu people seem to have had military and political concerns with their neighbors, as hinted at by the walls, moats, and stone weapons found more recently. And some 30 excavated large-scale mounds, often with elaborate burials that include jade, ivory, and lacquer, show that there was widespread regional trade, primarily up the Yangtze River. To date, archaeologists have identified nearly 300 settlements in an area of 18,000 square kilometers, says Liu.

The age of many of these early sites, particularly Liangzhu itself, is controversial. New radiocarbon evidence shows that the massive stone and earth wall uncovered by Liu was constructed in the later period, just before Liangzhu’s collapse around 2250 B.C.E., says Wu Xiaohong of Peking University. Whether that huge effort was for defensive purposes or to hold back floods—there is some evidence of climate change— remains uncertain.

Whatever the wall’s purpose and age, Liangzhu itself had a broad influence that touched much of the territory of present day China. Its products—from jade to pottery—are scattered throughout the north and the east and are found in the western province of Gansu as well as the southwestern province of Sichuan. And the society appears to have imparted religious ideas that remain quintessentially Chinese. The Liangzhu people created circular disks called bi—symbolizing heaven—as well as squarish cylindrical congs—symbolizing earth—at a time when the Yellow River was still relatively sparsely settled. The bi and cong are widely found in the Yellow River region later and came to be seen as shapes that express the Chinese culture’s mythological understanding of the cosmos.

Mistaken identity

Although Hongshan and Liangzhu were among the first complex cultures in East Asia, others also clearly contributed elements now considered part of Chinese culture. The f irst lacquerware and protoporcelain, for example, appear to have emerged in the late Liangzhu period from the middle Yangtze River area, far upstream from Liangzhu itself. And rice, that staple and symbol of Chinese society, was domesticated over a long period of time in the lower reaches of the Yangtze, starting by 7000 B.C.E. or even earlier.

Other regions evolved their own unique cultures, styles, and traditions that did not obviously transfer to what later came to be called Chinese civilization. In 1987, archaeologists working on a 12-kilometer-square site called Sanxingdui, north of the modern city of Chengdu in Sichuan Province in the country’s rugged southwest, unearthed a spectacular array of finds. They found eerie bronze and gold masks, a gold scepter, jade ornaments, and massive bronze statues—including a 4-meter-high representation of a tree—from the period around 1200 B.C.E. Sanxingdui is unmentioned in any texts or myths, has no writing of its own, and lies in a remote area; a Tang dynasty poem warns that it is harder to get into Sichuan than heaven. So the evidence of a wealthy and complex culture here stunned both researchers and the Chinese public. Some of the artifacts hinted at connections to Central Asia and far southern China. “The discoveries in the province have forced Chinese archaeologists to completely rethink [Sichuan’s] importance in narratives of prehistoric and early historic China,” says Flad.

A decade later, archaeologists working elsewhere in Sichuan’s Chengdu Plain revealed a culture that appears to have been the predecessor of the Sanxingdui culture, dating to as early as 2500 B.C.E. The largest of these sites, called Baodun, had been mistaken for years for a later Han dynasty settlement. “Nobody believed a city could be from that early period,” recalls Wang Yi, who directs the Chengdu City Institute of Archaeology and Cultural Relics. After confirming the dates, “we realized it was a discovery to rewrite the history of Sichuan and even China.”

The settlements are on a smaller and less complex scale than the cities that emerged 1000 years later on the central plain. But since 1996, a total of eight early walled sites in Sichuan have been pinpointed, ranging in size from 10 to 66 hectares. Wang says the largest contained a population in the thousands, although he declines to be more specific pending further excavations. Many have small houses ringed around larger structures that sit on earthen platforms paved with pebbles. Construction of the walls resembles that downstream along the middle Yangtze, where other cultures are known to have flourished, but specific trade links remain unclear. Work on Baodun sites has been delayed, because many lie beneath modern towns and villages, and the 2001 discovery of the Jinsha site in Chengdu dating to 1000 B.C.E.—likely a successor to the Sanxingdui culture—forced regional archaeologists to focus their attention and resources there instead. Wang says there are plans to resume digs at Baodun once villages on the site are relocated.

The sophisticated sites in Sichuan, in the northeast, around Liangzhu and elsewhere have made it clear that “the origin of Chinese civilization is scattered all over the present-day country,” says Jiang Weidong, an archaeologist and director of the Liangzhu Museum outside the city of Hangzhou. Weidong thinks that these independent cultures began to link up only sporadically and gradually over many centuries. He notes that in later Chinese history, a half-dozen or so regions periodically reassert their sovereignty and that each of these regions had highly developed prehistoric cultures. For example, in the early centuries B.C.E., the Shu state in today’s Sichuan and the Yue state in the Liangzhu area repeatedly broke away from central control. The serial pattern of Chinese centralization followed by the rise of regional powers may be an artifact

of those ancient regional developments, Weidong suggests. Although not even half-complete, the project to define the origins of Chinese civilization has already laid to rest the notion of an imperial China rising from the central plains of the Yellow River to bestow its gifts on backward hinterlands. Now archaeologists face the challenging task of understanding how the myriad peoples and cultures of the region interacted over several millennia. UCLA’s Von Falkenhausen even suggests that, as a result of this complexity, “the very notion of [a single] Chinese civilization will probably have to be jettisoned.” Chinese scholars say that they will follow the data. “The focus of this project is not to prove the glory of Chinese civilization but to see how it formed,” says Wang. “We want the details.”

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ERLITOU, CHINA—In the 6th century B.C.E., Confucius referred to the ancient Xia dynasty as China’s first, based on documents that were old in his day. For generations of Chinese scholars, the Xia was China’s initial great flowering of civilization, inaugurating a history that unfolded in methodical fashion from city-state to empire (see main text and timeline, p. 930). But there was no physical evidence for the dynasty’s existence, so in 1959 an archaeological team set out to find its seat. Along this marshy section of the Luo River in the central plains of the Yellow River Valley, they uncovered a 300-hectare site dating to roughly the correct period—and promptly hailed it as the long-lost first capital.

But did the Xia, said to have flourished from 2100 B.C.E. to 1600 B.C.E., really exist? New, unpublished dates and excavation data from this modest site challenge its status as the capital of the Xia. “We have proven that Erlitou is the largest and most culturally developed site with the biggest population,” says Chen Guoliang, an assistant researcher at the site, standing in a gentle spring rain on the roof of the dig house. “But what it was exactly requires more research.”

Until the archaeological finds of the past half-century, most of what we knew of early Chinese history was based largely on ancient texts, which have a status here somewhat comparable to that of the Bible in the West. They provide a detailed account of how the Xia succumbed to the Shang dynasty, which in turn gave over to the Zhou dynasty around 1045 B.C.E. Although the texts were written long after most of the events, digs have confirmed many of the assertions made about the Shang and later eras. But the Xia dynasty has remained elusive, despite the identification of Erlitou as its capital.

During the past decade, Xu Hong of the Institute of Archaeology in Beijing has directed extensive excavations here, although digging has stopped for now to allow archaeologists to interpret their data and the site has been reburied and planted with wheat. The digs have revealed the details of Erlitou’s rise, including a central complex, possibly a palace, in the first phase. Then the settlement grew, the palace area was walled, and a street network was built. A section of road with wagon tracks provides the oldest evidence for wheeled vehicles in China, though whether they were pulled by humans or draft animals is unclear. Many bronze and other precious artifacts, including a spectacular, snakelike turquoise dragon, were apparently made in the palace area and found in large numbers in nearby tombs of the elite. At its peak, as many as 20,000 people may have lived at Erlitou before it slowly faded into obscurity around 1500 B.C.E.

“It looks like a planned city, separated by function, with relatively clustered tombs, workshop areas, pottery workshops near the river, and a clear hierarchy,” says Chen. With regular walls surrounding a spacious palace complex near the city center and wide, straight streets, Erlitou’s design matches an urban layout that became common throughout China for millennia and is still visible in cities like Beijing, built around the Forbidden City.

Xu’s radiocarbon dating of Erlitou to between 1900 B.C.E. and 1500 B.C.E. was later than records indicated for the Xia. Some archaeologists therefore called Erlitou a “late Xia” capital. Now, a larger series of organic samples from the lower layers shift the start date even later— to approximately 1750 B.C.E., says Wu Xiaohong of Peking University, where the samples were recently analyzed. That will make it much more difficult to connect Erlitou with the Xia, which was supposedly ending at the time Erlitou was evolving.

Most younger archaeologists avoid the term Xia altogether. They prefer the term “Erlitou culture” to “Xia dynasty,” and its successor “Erligang culture” to “Shang dynasty.” Chen explains that “old scholars who graduated before the Cultural Revolution are steeped in a background centered on written Chinese history and they wanted to solve the ‘problem’ of the Xia and Shang dynasties by using archaeology to prove their view.” He adds that the Cultural Revolution wiped away the traditional lineages of historians, while archaeologists have since embraced Western methods. “Only physical evidence can prove the existence of these two dynasties,” he says.

Xu, the excavation chief, criticizes the recent government-funded Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project as “a kind of political propaganda.” For him, “archaeology and legendary history are different disciplines.” He says that research has been overshadowed for too long by a preoccupation with the dynastic tradition.

As Xu and his team analyze the data from a decade of excavation, they are focusing on how salt production may have been Erlitou’s economic driver; such issues are neglected in the written histories. The resulting scenario may be less dramatic than the texts’ story of a great storm sent by heaven—complete with 3 days of blood rain—that inaugurated the Xia kingdom, but more convincing to modern archaeologists. F

or many researchers, the controversy pitting texts against excavations is a distraction rather than an assault on Confucian learning. Like Near Eastern archaeologists, they are happy to make use of revered ancient texts but do not treat them as revealed truth. “We don’t just want to know whether Erlitou is Xia; we want to know the economic and political system. That’s what’s important,” says Ma Xiaolin, vice director of the Henan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology in nearby Zhengzhou. “We don’t care about the name; we just want a clearer picture.”

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Researchers work to transform China’s development boom from a curse into a blessing for ancient sites

CHENGDU, CHINA—Amid tangles of highways and phalanxes of high rises in this booming capital of Sichuan province, more than 30 hectares of prime urban real estate—three times as large as New York City’s Battery Park—is meticulously landscaped around two massive glass, steel, and stone pavilions. But unlike many of the high-rise buildings, this $75 million, 2-year-old complex is not the modern headquarters of a successful Chinese corporation. Instead, it is a museum paying homage to a 3000-year-old settlement and its surprisingly rich culture, which until recently was completely unknown.

This sprawling ancient site, called Jinsha, lies 1000 kilometers from the traditional center of Chinese civilization along the Yellow River (see p. 934) and deep within a region long assumed to have been a cultural backwater until it was absorbed into the Qin dynasty in the 3rd century B.C.E. In recent decades, however, archaeologists have uncovered astonishing evidence of sophisticated and largely independent cultures in the region dating back to 2500 B.C.E., cultures that are helping to rewrite the origins of Chinese civilization (see p. 930).

A decade ago, Jinsha was still buried. Until its accidental discovery during a construction project, the site was verdant farmland on the outskirts of a city with a mere 5 million people. Today, thanks to savvy archaeologists and their allies in city government, the new Jinsha Site Museum not only offers a welcome haven from urban sprawl but also sets aside a large area for future digs. The excavated area is covered with a vast glass roof, and a separate building houses state-of-the-art exhibits. Chengdu hotels and department stores proudly sport the site’s icon, a gold sun disk surrounded by four birds, as a symbol of the city’s unique past.

Jinsha creates a place of beauty, bolsters civic pride, and pulls in tourists—and its success is encouraging other cities to follow suit. “Dozens of local governments have come to see this,” says Zhu Zhangyi, 49, who is now the museum’s vice curator. “It has become a model.” Western archaeologists are deeply impressed, too. “The priority is to teach people about their past,” says Gary Crawford of the University of Toronto, Mississauga, in Canada. “They are willing to put real money into that—and we could learn some lessons from that.”

Archaeologists say models such as this are desperately needed in a country developing more rapidly than any other in human history. Half of the world’s concrete is poured in China. There are more than 2 million kilometers of highways, double the amount there was in 1986. And cities like Chengdu— which now boasts more than 10 million people and adds a million a year—have mushroomed, eating up land along rivers and on plains typically favored by ancient peoples. The pace of construction threatens to destroy sites ranging from Paleolithic campsites to Han royal tombs, and with them, a treasure trove of data critical for understanding the role of East Asia in early human migrations, animal and plant domestication, and urbanization.

Halting or even slowing development in a society eager to emerge from rural poverty is not possible. Instead, archaeologists are exploring creative ways to collaborate with both government and developers, and using museums like Jinsha’s to build popular support forpreserving key sites. Thus China’s development boom is powering a new wave of archaeological discovery and appreciation even as it threatens sites. Courts are increasingly willing to enforce harsh penalties on looters (see sidebar, this page). And in a dramatic departure from the past, local governments are now willing to lend support and funds to preserve sites. “It was a great fortune we discovered [Jinsha] in 2001,” says archaeologist Zhu, who led the team that examined the site just ahead of developers. “If it had been earlier, it would have been impossible to preserve the whole area.”

During a recent visit by Science, however, archaeologists at several provincial centers also warned that they must race to keep up with the bulldozers and have largely set aside purely academic endeavors in order to rescue sites. The recent economic downturn, rather than easing the pace, has only quickened it, as the central government pumps hundreds of billions of dollars into dams, canals, and highways to stimulate the economy. Says Zhu: “We have to do our best to persuade our government that if it doesn’t move aggressively to protect sites, there will be nothing left in 10 or 20 years.”

Water over the dam?

The current boom is hardly the first threat to China’s past. Qin Shi Huang, the man credited with first unifying China in the 3rd century B.C.E., consolidated the Great Wall and left behind the famous terracottaarmy in his mausoleum—two of the modern nation’s most famous tourist attractions. But he also ordered that evidence of previous rulers be destroyed in order to ensure his importance in history. More than 2 millennia later, China’s revolutionary leader Mao Zedong encouraged his people to obliterate “old ways of thinking,” triggering the destruction of thousands of ancient buildings and artifacts. During the years of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s, archaeological publishing ceased, university courses were restricted to political subjects, and many researchers were forced out of their jobs.

Today, the more insidious threat is not to China’s visible past but to the undiscovered sites that lay safely underground until recent development. The most infamous example of this third wave of destruction is the Three Gorges Dam project, which began in 1993 and eventually drowned a 600-kilometer stretch of the middle Yangtze River. The government initially allotted $37.5 million for archaeological salvage, although archaeologists called for at least $500 million. The amount was only marginally increased, and salvage work was not finished before the dam was completed in 2006 (Science, 1 August 2008, p. 628). “We may have missed a few sites,” says one Chinese archaeologist sheepishly.

Other massive projects have received less publicity but are having a tremendous impact. The $8 billion South-North Water Transfer Project will divert water from the wetter areas of central and southern China to its thirsty north, through a complex mix of reservoirs, canals, and dams. When complete by 2014 (Science, 25 August 2006, p. 1034), the central route—an average of 110 meters wide—will cut across nearly 1300 kilometers, much of it in central Henan Province, which is traditionally considered the homeland of Chinese civilization.

Ma Xiaolin, vice-director of the Henan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology in Zhengzhou, says work on the canal has uncovered some 340 sites in Henan alone, from Neolithic settlements to Tang Dynasty tombs. Ma says time and funding for salvage work are ample, but there are complications. Archaeologists are now excavating a 2000-year-old king’s tomb and have requested that the government alter the canal route. “No decision has been made,” says another scientist familiar with the site. “It’s a sensitive issue.”

That sensitivity reflects the tension between development and preservation. China passed a heritage protection law in 1982, but archaeologists say it was only haphazardly enforced until recently. “In past decades, we were in a very bad position,” says Wang Yi, who leads the Chengdu City Institute of Archaeology and Cultural Relics. “Since the first law was passed 27 years ago, we have been fighting against developers. And in the past, local governors were enemies of archaeologists. … We could not counter a city’s development.”

But that is changing. In 1997, the government made violations of cultural heritage laws a criminal act punishable by jail terms and even the death penalty. In Chengdu, the manager of a real-estate company went to jail for 5 years for failing to do archaeological salvage work before construction. “There have been those who destroyed sites and artifacts—but now, if they do, they get in big trouble,” says Wang. “Even government officers don’t dare break this law.”

Hearts and minds

Along with the legal stick comes a carrot. Both the city and provincial government see that development “is not just about an increase in GDP,” asserts Wang. “We have to make this mainstream, so that all branches of government and citizens support archaeology.” He and a growing number of other Chinese researchers are increasingly involved in outreach activities to create a broader constituency for protecting sites. “It is impossible not to lose some sites,” says Wang Wei, director of the Institute of Archaeology in Beijing. “But the public is starting to appreciate the importance of cultural heritage—and that you can move the site of a planned building.”

The archaeologists’ efforts can be seen in a new and surprising phenomenon: multimillion dollar popular archaeological museums that have opened in recent years across China, sporting three-dimensional movies, elegant restaurants, and exhibits that equal or surpass those in major U.S., European, and Japanese cities. Many, like the Jinsha museum, are on land protected from further development. “For less than $100 million, the Chengdu municipal government bought a history 1000 years older than it had before,” Zhu says over sushi in the chic museum restaurant.

In another example, last October a gleaming monument of Iranian marble opened outside the southern port city of Hangzhou to celebrate Liangzhu, which started flourishing around 3500 B.C.E. and is one of the oldest major settlements in China. Now 42 hectares around the site have been protected from major development. When a real-estate company sought to buy neighboring land, the government sold it for under market value in exchange for nearly $24 million for the museum and private-sector expertise in big projects. “This was a real innovation,” says archaeologist Jiang Weidong, director of the Liangzhu Museum, over tea in his sleek Bauhaus-style office.

The exhibit lays out methods of excavation, the evolution of the site, and the day-to-day life of its people 5000 years ago, using cutting-edge artifacts, films, and displays. Visitors can even walk through a recreation of the settlement, showing both the jade-wearing elite—who were buried in elaborate tombs high on earthen platforms— as well as modest tradespeople and rice and millet farmers in wattle-and-daub houses.

Back in Chengdu, archaeologists are also using their facilities to win the hearts and minds of their citizens. After the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, curators at Jinsha opened the grounds to more than 40,000 people who camped out amid fears of aftershocks. To mark the first anniversary of the disaster in May, they waived admission fees and drew an impressive 50,000 citizens. Regular festivals promote the site as a cultural oasis amid the city’s congestion.

Such efforts raise awareness of the nation’s heritage, and plans for park and museum complexes at ancient sites are taking hold all over China, from the 3500-year-old city of Erlitou in the central plains to the ancient Silk Road city of Turfan in the far western province of Xinjiang (see p. 940). In May, a new underwater museum opened along the Yangtze, preserving 1200-year-old poetic inscriptions and measurements of annual high-water levels on rock from the waters impounded by the Three Gorges Dam. Such museums also provide opportunities for archaeologists themselves, and some scholars who studied abroad are now finding ways to return to China for research or even permanently (see sidebar, p. 938).

Getting the goods

In the rush to modernize, modest prehistoric settlements are at particular risk, although sometimes they can win a reprieve. In Shaanxi province, west of the central plains, for example, construction of a vehicle factory was put on hold after the discovery of an unusually complex, moated, Neolithic site with a line of pottery kilns suggesting specialized handcrafts, dated to a surprisingly early 4000 B.C.E. “The site was preserved, and the provincial government paid dozens of millions of yuan [tens of millions of U.S. dollars] to move the factory,” says Wang Weilin, vice director of the Shaanxi Archaeological Institute.

Wang, whose organization includes 130 archaeologists, says developers pay nearly $3 million annually to cover the costs of salvage work in his province. But he is particularly concerned about smaller sites without dramatic architecture and artifacts. “We see traces of such sites, but we worry we might not catch up with development,” he says. Harvard University archaeologist Rowan Flad, who is collaborating with Wang, notes that international efforts “are often the only way Back in Chengdu, archaeologists are also using their facilities to win the hearts and minds of their citizens. After the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, curators at Jinsha opened the grounds to more than 40,000 that work beyond that of a salvage nature can get done,” because of the time pressures on Chinese institutes.

Smaller, more ancient sites are also at greater risk because they typically lack what Chinese archaeologists privately call “hao dongxi,” which can be roughly translated as “goodies” in English. “There is a tendency among some Chinese archaeologists to look for the goodies, that is, the grave goods with artistic merit and which embody China’s cultural heritage,” says Magnus Fiskesjö, an anthropologist at Cornell University. “Fishbones don’t qualify.”

As a result, material with the potential for providing critical data on scientific questions, such as ancient diet, health, and social organization—including fishbones—is often overlooked, particularly during fast-paced salvage digs. Even human bones are often still disposed of rather than analyzed, says Fiskesjö.

That tendency is changing, albeit unevenly. In Zhengzhou, Ma, who studied at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, is eager to show off his labs and storage facilities, which include well-labeled blue bins of human and animal bones from a host of sites. “Smaller institutes just collect artifacts and throw away the rest,” he says. “We want to focus on new techniques involving plants, animals, and human skeletons and set up databases for each site.” With a healthy $3 million annual budget, Ma’s institute has the funds to do more detailed research. But the organization is now juggling a dozen excavations, and he expects to conduct more than 30 digs this year alone—90% of which are salvage operations.

Despite—and because of—the pace of development, archaeologists in China appear surprisingly optimistic. “Given the investment from our government, the 21st century will be a golden age for archaeology in Sichuan,” predicts Chengdu’s Wang. With an interested public plus provincial government coffers filled by the economic boom, China is now paying heed to its archaeological treasures in a way that once might have been criticized as a bourgeois luxury. Says Jiang, smiling over green tea in his sun-filled office: “When your granary is full, you pay more attention to ceremony.”

Science-2009-Lawler-Archaeologists_Raise_The_Old_With_the_New-936-40.pdf

ARCHAEOLOGY IN CHINA

In the summer of 1998, a reservoir in a rural area of Hunan in southern China dried up. As the water receded, local farmers found ancient pottery and porcelain from the 10th to 13th century C.E. Song Dynasty, which produced some of the world’s finest ceramic art. Within a few weeks, hundreds of looters were openly digging at the site. Despite an outcry from a television reporter and a few cultural-heritage specialists, local officials refused to intervene. It was not until the following February that police arrived to stop the illegal digs, arrest the culprits, and clear the way for a team of archaeologists to save what they could.

In a land chock-full of wealthy tombs and poor farmers, grave robbing is an ancient tradition. But in the past decade, China has tightened its laws against looting, a reflection of changing attitudes toward archaeological treasures (see main text). Now those who destroy the country’s past face jail terms and even the death penalty, although no one appears to have actually been executed for looting. Earlier this year, the United States and China agreed to work together to prevent smuggling of looted Chinese antiquities. “The situation in China has improved dramatically in recent years,” says Stefan Gruber, a lawyer at the University of Sydney in Australia, who follows the Chinese situation closely.

But he adds that although “the central government has good ideas, the local governments do not necessarily follow their orders.” Archaeologist and China expert Lothar von Falkenhausen of the University of California, Los Angeles, remains deeply concerned. “The looters are absolutely everywhere,” he says. “Archaeologists can’t keep up, and the looting often takes place with the connivance of local authorities.” Von Falkenhausen adds that the new U.S.–China agreement merely shuts American dealers out of a market increasingly driven by wealthy Chinese collectors.

The pace of destruction is difficult to quantify, but it is clearly still taking place. In the northeast, for example, between 4000 and 15,000 tombs from the Neolithic Hongshan culture (see p. 930), which produced rich jades in fantastic animal shapes 5000 years ago, have been damaged or destroyed by looters during the past decade, says He Shuzhong of the National Administration on Cultural Heritage in Beijing. In the southern province of Hubei, 2000-year-old graves filled with jewelry, documents written on bamboo, and other artifacts have been stolen. “When an archaeological team finally went in, there was nothing left to save,” says one archaeologist familiar with the destruction.

In response to such damage, museum and site security has recently improved. At the Yanghai cemetery in the remote western province of Xinjiang, for example, looters who a decade ago helped themselves to jewelry in the 3000-year-old graveyard are now stymied by a high fence, locked gate, and live-in caretaker. Recent high-profile cases, coupled with educational initiatives, are making China’s vast population aware that looting is illegal and unpatriotic.

Although strict laws likely dissuade many looters, they can have a perverse effect. Local farmers near Erlitou, one of China’s oldest urban centers (see p. 934), now hesitate to bring artifacts found during plowing to archaeologists, perhaps fearing stiff penalties, says Chen Guoliang, an assistant researcher at the site.

Clicking on his laptop in his office at the Erlitou dig house, Chen pulls up several images of similar turquoise inlaid bronze plaques that appear to be in a style arguably unique to Erlitou. The use of these elaborate objects remains unclear, and archaeologists are eager to find more in context. But only one was legally excavated from the site. How and when the others were found remains a mystery, though Chen believes that they almost certainly came from Erlitou. Today, the other plaques reside in public and private collections around the world, from the Miho Museum in Japan to Harvard University in the United States. (Many museums have taken at face value claims by sellers that artifacts were legally exported.) Once taken out of their context and sold, says Chen, such artifacts— whose provenance is difficult to verify— no longer have a story about China’s heritage worth telling.

SCIENCE VOL 325 21 AUGUST 2009

Science-2009-Lawler-Landing_the_Looters-937.pdf

Zhijun Zhao started his career like many promising Chinese students: by studying in the United States with an eye to staying. He got his Ph.D. at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and rose through the academic ranks, acquiring the nickname “Jimmy” and eventually landing a comfortable job at a museum in Kansas City. He also got a coveted green card that put him on the path to U.S. citizenship—all the ingredients of the American dream. “Big houses and cars—I could have lived the easy life,” he muses today.

But instead, in 1999, Zhao made a bold decision. He returned to China and opened a lab at the Institute of Archaeology in Beijing, which at the time lacked many of the modern facilities common at any American university. He was given 5000 yuan—about $600 at the time—in start-up money. “I spent 4000 yuan on a microscope,” Zhao recalls with a laugh. He held on to the green card for a full year.

Zhao’s move was a gamble. But today, many Chinese-born scientists educated in the West return to China, says Wang Wei, director of the Beijing institute. Although in the past, that return may have been pushed by difficulties in language, culture, and getting a job overseas, now China is exerting a magnetic pull. As archaeology attracts attention, central and provincial governments are spending more on new facilities and better salaries (see main text). Researchers are drawn home by family ties and professional opportunities. “We want all of our overseas scholars to come back,” says Wang. “And we do our best to provide a good environment for researchers.”

The homeward pull is a relatively new phenomenon. With rare exceptions, war and politics isolated China from the outside world between World War II and Mao Zedong’s death in 1976. For the most part, archaeological finds made behind the Bamboo Curtain remained unknown in the West, while new theories and methods failed to penetrate into China.

Starting in the 1980s, large numbers of Chinese students, including archaeologists, began to study in the West. Some stayed, though others tried to keep a toehold in China as well. For example, Tianlong Jiao studied at Harvard University and is now an archaeologist at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. He moves easily between worlds, doing fieldwork on trade and agriculture in South China and often visiting colleagues at the Beijing institute. But his status as a researcher in both countries may already be an anomaly. “I am probably among the few, if not the only one,” he says.

Zhao says he has no regrets about returning to his homeland. His 2008 budget is 1.5 million yuan, or $220,000, and his modest lab in a Beijing suburb has an enthusiastic staff of mostly young researchers. On a recent weekday, his team ate lunch together and chatted about work, taking breaks at a Ping-Pong table in a nearby room. Some are specialists in dating ancient wood—dendrochronology—while others analyze spores and pollen to understand paleoenvironments, and another group identifies isotopes in animal bones uncovered in a recent dig. English as well as Chinese textbooks line the walls.

This analytical approach to archaeology marks a radical coming of age for the field in China, where organic material—from human bones to pollen—is still routinely ignored in the search for valuable grave goods. Zhao’s example, other archaeologists say, is a powerful motivator for adopting newer techniques. The world is taking notice; a May workshop on archaeological methods in Beijing drew experts from several countries.

Zhao still bemoans the difficulty of getting things done in China, compared with the ease of life in the United States. But he says China’s authorities place no restrictions on his work: “Anything related to scientific research is OK.” The energy of his home country is palpable just outside his lab, where new high rises are sprouting all around while a group of elderly women perform their morning tai chi exercises.

Last year, Zhao returned to the United States to give a talk and made a pilgrimage back to Columbia to see his former colleagues. “I was surprised,” he says. “Nothing had changed. In China, you see change every day. There is just more activity and more opportunity.”

21 AUGUST 2009 VOL 325 SCIENCE

Science-2009-Lawler-Go_East_Young_Archaeologist-938.pdf

ARCHAEOLOGY IN CHINA:

China’s far west, home to unique ancient cultures, may help reveal how technology and goods flowed from West to East to shape Chinese civilization.

Desert death. A 4000-year-old child mummy peers out of his wooden coffin in Xiaohe cemetery on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert.

CREDIT: XINJIANG CULTURAL RELICS AND ARCHAEOLOGY INSTITUTE

YANGHAI, XINJIANG PROVINCE—No place on Earth is farther from an ocean than this dusty spot in the Taklamakan Desert in northwest China. But when archaeologist Lu Enguo recently excavated the sprawling 3000-year-old Yanghai cemetery here, he found a cowrie shell from either the Pacific or the Indian Ocean in the undisturbed tomb of a local shaman. That holy man—his body naturally mummified in the dry climate—was dressed in the style of the Russian steppes, with a headband of gold, a brilliantly colored woven garment, and a ceremonial bronze ax by his side. For him, the wealthy and fertile eastern land called China may have been just a rumor or tall tale.

Yet despite the distance to ancient centers of Chinese culture, Lu, who works for Xinjiang’s archaeology off ice in nearby Turfan, believes that this remote region may hold the key to understanding early Chinese civilization because of its crucial role in trade. Lu and many of his colleagues argue that as far back as the 3rd millennium B.C.E., during the rise of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus civilizations, Xinjiang may have served as a critical bridge between East and West, funneling some combination of bronzemaking, wheat domestication, and other technologies toward the incipient Chinese culture. Those technologies may have helped jump-start Chinese urban life along the Yellow and Yangtze rivers in the 2nd millennium B.C.E. (see p. 930).

That is a novel, even radical, idea among Chinese academics, many of whom still see Xinjiang as a distant region that enters history only when a unified China began to assert control in the early centuries B.C.E. Indeed, not so long ago, such discussion of outside influence on China’s origins would have been at best frowned upon and at worst dangerous. “Ten years ago, you could not even say that China adopted anything from the West,” says one Chinese archaeologist. After more than a century of humiliation at the hands of foreigners—both Western and Japanese—China’s leaders in the 20th century emphasized the country’s indigenous traditions, and archaeologists followed their direction. Now recent discoveries, coupled with the growing self-confidence of a prosperous nation, are challenging the taboo. “Chinese archaeologists still believe China’s civilization developed independently,” says Wang Wei, director of the Institute of Archaeology in Beijing. “But they also believe that there was important communication with the outside world.”

Before the Silk Road

China’s contact with that outside world may have come from several directions—from Xinjiang in the northwest, from the steppes to the north, overland through Burma and Yunnan to the south, or around Southeast Asia to the eastern coast. The most direct route from the west to east is here in Xinjiang. For centuries starting in the first century B.C.E., the fabled Silk Road stretched across its deserts and mountains, linking the eastern cities of China with European markets. Roman silver, f ine silk, Buddhism, and Islam were passed across its length. Caves filled with Buddhist images, crumbling caravansaries, and ruined cities still dot the province’s dry and rugged landscape.

Forest of graves. These poplar poles from Xiaohe cemetery hint at a wetter climate 4 millennia ago.

CREDIT: XINJIANG CULTURAL RELICS AND ARCHAEOLOGY INSTITUTE

Today, Xinjiang still retains the hallmarks of a crossroads region. Signs in Arabic script and Russian Cyrillic compete with Chinese characters in the province’s capital, Ürümqi, which is closer to Islamabad than it is to Beijing. It is home to ethnic Uighurs—many of whom are Muslim—who traditionally have more in common with their Central Asian brethren than the Han Chinese of the east. Recent ethnic riots in Ürümqi left at least 156 dead and 1000 people injured.

But until the past decade, archaeologists had found little detailed evidence of early human occupation here. Ringed by high mountains, the Taklamakan is one of the world’s driest and hottest deserts. So archaeologists and historians assumed that life here was all but impossible until camels were domesticated and deeper wells and other innovations were developed—long after Chinese cities began to flourish thousands of kilometers to the southeast.

Recent excavations have upended that assumption. In the northeastern edge of the desert, archaeologists from 2002 until 2005 excavated an extraordinary cemetery called Xiaohe, which has been radiocarbon-dated to as early as 2000 B.C.E., says Liu Xuetang, a professor at Ürümqi University and former director of Xinjiang’s archaeology institute in Ürümqi. A vast oval sand hill covering 25 hectares, the site is a forest of 140 standing poles marking the graves of a long-lost society and environment. The poles, wood coffins, and carved wooden statues with pronounced noses come from the poplar forests of a far cooler and wetter climate.

Well-wrapped. One of 30 mummies from Xiaohe buried in airtight ox-hide bags, preserving both skin and cloth.

CREDIT: XINJIANG CULTURAL RELICS AND ARCHAEOLOGY INSTITUTE

A bronze mirror, gold ring, and scatterings of domesticated wheat found in some of the undisturbed tombs show a Central Asian influence. Ox skulls tied to the top of the wooden grave markers show that these animals were sacred. One grave includes a carved wooden snake, the remains of seven real snakes, and a hat made up of small pieces of the ears of sheep, probably serving shamanic purposes common to Central Asia but foreign to eastern China. A tomb of a child holds a pouch with the remains of ephedra, a drug favored by ancient Central Asian pastoralists.

Of 350 tombs, Liu says 190 had been looted and destroyed, but 160 were excavated in the recent digs by a Chinese team. The human remains are eerily well-preserved. Behind the locked doors of the storeroom of the Ürümqi institute, Liu points to a young woman with still-smooth skin and auburn hair, wearing a white wool hat and felt shoes with laces still intact. French and Japanese researchers are helping to analyze the goods and remains at Xiaohe, but that work is still ongoing, he says.

The origins of the Xiaohe culture—which lasted for some 5 centuries, until approximately 1500 B.C.E.—remain obscure. They do not appear to have used pottery, making their connections to other cultures opaque, but there is no evidence that these likely pastoralists were significantly influenced by the Yellow River and other settled cultures to the east. Liu argues that, given their material culture, they probably entered from the north, from present-day Russia, over the Tien Shan mountain range, before 2000 B.C.E. Although no extensive paleoclimate studies have been done, some evidence suggests that the climate became wetter at that time. The poplar no longer found in the area is one sign, as is increased snowfall that created channels through the Tarim Basin that contains the Taklamakan. Some lakebed samples in northwest China hint at a warm and wet period between 2800 and 2000 B.C.E., followed by a 1000-year cold and dry spell, says environmental archaeologist Qi Wuyun of the Institute of Archaeology in Beijing. But she adds that further data are needed.

Shipshape. Some Xiaohe tombs feature boat-shaped wooden coffins unique to the site.

CREDIT: XINJIANG CULTURAL RELICS AND ARCHAEOLOGY INSTITUTE

The most important area of settlement may have been an environmentally hostile region on the desert’s eastern end called Lop Nur, which China used to conduct nuclear tests. But in ancient times, “the Lop Nur delta was a large oasis hundreds of kilometers in length,” Liu says. Preliminary surveys and geological studies suggest a string of settlements along the now-dry Peacock River, which once flowed east and ended in a marshy lake.

Researchers in others parts of Central Asia have found many settlements in similarly marginal climatic zones during the period, such as Gonur in the Kara Kum desert of Turkmenistan. But little archaeological work has been done along the Peacock because of its remoteness, security constraints, and a focus on rescuing sites endangered by development (see p. 936). Increasing aridity by 1500 B.C.E. may have forced the Peacock settlers to revert to a nomadic existence, says Liu. That cycle seems common throughout recorded history in Xinjiang, where small changes in rainfall have a dramatic effect.

Other ancient Xinjiang cemeteries, most from the period starting in 1500 B.C.E., are coming to light and may offer additional clues. At one site in Xiabandi, in the far western end of the province near the Pamir Mountains and adjacent to Kazakhstan, archaeologists found pottery resembling that of the Andronovo pastoralist culture of the steppes. Yet they also found bracelets and earrings that Liu says are in a style common to Gansu, a Chinese province far to the southeast. And to the northwest of Ürümqi, bordering the steppes, Liu excavated a settlement from 1000 B.C.E. with round altars and evidence of horse and sun worship—classic traditions of steppe pastoralists. But at the same site, he also excavated painted pottery of a type found in the upper Yellow River valley. Such finds offer intriguing but still enigmatic evidence of the links between Central Asian pastoralists and China proper, says Liu.

On the bronze trail

The connection between the steppes and eastern China clearly existed. But did pastoralists such as those buried in Xiaohe carry important technologies like bronze eastward? That idea remains controversial. Bronze technologies in the form of weapons and adornment appear starting in the 3rd millennium B.C.E. across the steppes. The Xinjiang bronzes appear to be slightly earlier than several found in Gansu, to the southeast, and then, not long after, in Erlitou in the mid-Yellow River area. That makes for a neat pattern of diffusion. “But the techniques used in Gansu are more developed than in Xinjiang,” notes Liu. And the earliest bronze-casting workshops in the region don’t appear until the 4th century B.C.E., adds Lu. “It is not likely these skills were introduced from Xinjiang,” he says, standing on the parched ground at the Yanghai cemetery.

Trade with Central Asia likely led to the acquisition of bronzes here—but not necessarily the means to make them, Lu says. He and others increasingly think that bronze technology filtered south from Inner Mongolia, far to the east, and eventually was picked up by peoples along the Yellow River.

Heads up. This tiny wooden face provides a glimpse into the beliefs of the Xiaohe people.

CREDIT: XINJIANG CULTURAL RELICS AND ARCHAEOLOGY INSTITUTE

But others point out that mold-casting dominates early Chinese metallurgy, and that technology is not used until later in the region between Europe and Central Asia—arguing against a technology transfer. Some scholars argue there was a connection with the West but that the technology then took an independent turn. Evidence for all theories remains thin. “How does it get to Gansu?” asks Chen Xingcan of the Institute of Archaeology in Beijing. “The route is just not clear.”

Whatever the route for bronze, Lu cites another transformative import that he says arrived from the west via the Peacock River valley: wheat. Domesticated first in the Near East 10,000 years ago, wheat is northern China’s most important staple today. And at the moment, the oldest domesticated wheat in China seems to be that strewn over bodies before burial at Xiaohe 3000 years ago. “The new term we use is the ‘wheat road,’” says Lu.

But other archaeologists in China are not yet convinced. Wheat next turns up in the 1st millennium B.C.E. in northern China, and it’s not clear if wheat from Xiaohe made its way there or if diffusion from the west simply stopped in Xinjiang. “We need to find actual wheat fields at Xiaohe,” says Xiaohong Wu of Peking University. Some researchers instead see a pattern similar to that of bronze, with wheat coming from the steppes through Inner Mongolia. And a recent find of a few early wheat samples roughly dated to 2000 B.C.E. in the far southeastern province of Fujian raise the possibility of seaborne transfer from the Indus civilization in today’s India and Pakistan.

Similar debates revolve around the appearance of domesticated sheep, goats, and cattle in China. Xinjiang sites show evidence of all three in the 2nd millennium B.C.E.—about the time that they appear in central China. But tracing a path of diffusion is difficult, in part because there are few Chinese zooarchaeologists. Everyone agrees that these questions require more extensive excavations in the province as well as better analytical techniques. In a region that retains its position as a continental crossroads, archaeologists are only starting to understand how this bridge between East and West contributed to China’s evolution.

Science 21 August 2009:
Vol. 325. no. 5943, pp. 940 – 943
DOI: 10.1126/science.325_940

Science-2009-Lawler-Bridging_East_and_West-940-3.pdf

ARCHAEOLOGY IN CHINA:

If you said rice was the most important grain in ancient China, you’d be wrong, according to some archaeologists, who believe lowly millet served as the staple grain that allowed Chinese civilization to flourish in ancient times.

What was the most important grain in ancient China? If you said rice, you’d be wrong, according to some archaeologists. It was lowly millet that served as the staple grain that allowed Chinese civilization to flourish in ancient times, says archaeologist Gary Crawford of the University of Toronto, Mississauga, in Canada. “Millet was the principal crop that supported town life,” he says. Although rice began to be domesticated in the southeast by 7000 B.C.E. or even earlier, millet was grown all across China in the preurban era, from the north to the southeastern coast.

And whereas important goods and technologies like wheat, bronze, horses, and chariots all flowed from West to East starting some 4000 years ago, perhaps across China’s westernmost provinces (see main text), there is now intriguing evidence that millet traveled the other way. Some researchers say the grain was first domesticated in northern China as early as 8000 B.C.E. and made its way to the Black Sea region of Europe by 5000 B.C.E. If so, it would be a sign of far earlier and extensive connections—going both ways—across the vast Eurasian landmass.

Until this year, the earliest solid evidence of domesticated millet dated to about 6000 B.C.E. from a handful of sites in northern China. But in May, seed cases found at a northeastern site called Cishan in Hebei Province were dated to 8000 B.C.E., according to a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Houyuan Lu of the Institute of Geology and Geophysics in Beijing and colleagues.

That’s the oldest sign yet of this short-season crop, says Crawford, who backs the claim. But others are skeptical. The seed cases are domesticated millet, agrees Zhijun Zhao of the Institute of Archaeology in Beijing—but the dates are 2000 years older than the Cishan settlement itself, a 400-square-meter site with many storage pits, stone grinders, and sickles. Houyuan counters that his team’s dates, done with accelerator mass spectrometry analysis of carbon-14, are solid. “To confirm our results, we rechecked the stratigraphy and obtained additional C14 dates from a second C14 laboratory,” he says. “Previous archaeological excavations in Cishan might be incomplete.” Crawford agrees, noting that Cishan was dated back in the 1970s.

Whether the Cishan millet proves to be as old as supporters say, other sites in the region clearly show that millet was grown in significant quantities in northeastern China long before it appears around the Black Sea and in central Europe. Zhao and Crawford, for example, have dated millet at a northeastern Chinese site called Xinglonggou to approximately 5640 B.C.E. Early farmers in the region typically planted the crop on the fine and loose soil called loess, which may have been the home of millet’s still-unknown wild ancestor. The grain—which can be turned into flour, porridge, or beer—then spread across northern China. It was widely planted in the Yellow River region and as far southwest as the Chengdu plain, where it became an important staple by 4000 B.C.E.

Millet either diffused from China to Europe or was domesticated independently in each place. Archaeologist Martin Jones of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom suspects that the timing of millet’s appearance around the Black Sea is no coincidence. Millet can produce seeds quickly—in 45 to 60 days—and the most common variety can survive dry conditions that kill other grains like wheat. So although wheat must have been traded across the steppes, mountains, and deserts that separate China and the Near East, millet could have been passed along by farmers who took up its cultivation across central Asia. Early results from ongoing genetic studies suggest that Chinese and European millets are indeed related, Jones says cautiously. Next year, he hopes to go into the field in Kazakhstan and China’s northwest to find millet remains that might connect the dots between north China and the West. “It may seem like looking for a needle in the haystack,” says Jones, “but we’re going to track down these sites.”

Science 21 August 2009:
Vol. 325. no. 5943, pp. 942 – 943
DOI: 10.1126/science.325_942

Science-2009-Lawler-Millet_on_the_Move-942-3.pdf

Obama’s nominee for NASA administrator is trying to rally public support on the eve of the moon landing anniversary as an expert panel and Congress worry that NASA has lost its way.

Looking ahead. The Senate is expected to approve Charles Bolden and Lori Garver to lead NASA.

CREDIT: UPI/NEWSCOM

Next week marks 40 years since NASA first put men on the moon. But trepidation about the space agency’s future is dampening celebration of that milestone achievement. “NASA is not what it was,” declared the chair of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation committee during last week’s confirmation hearing for Charles Bolden Jr., President Barack Obama’s choice to lead the agency.

Rather than inspiring the nation with wondrous feats of science and exploration, said Senator Jay Rockefeller (D–WV), NASA is adrift. The agency’s biggest fan on Capitol Hill agrees. “That magic is gone,” bemoaned Senator Bill Nelson (D–FL), who once flew on the soon-to-be-retired shuttle. Even Bolden, a 62-year-old retired Marine general and astronaut, joined the chorus of gloom during a hearing in which legislators lauded his fitness for the job.

But some remedies to this midlife crisis are emerging. The day before Bolden testified, the National Academies’ National Research Council (NRC) released a report urging the space agency to link its efforts to broader national goals. Both the report and Bolden suggest that NASA support more basic research, as it once did, and take the lead in monitoring the environment. Both thrusts will require greater cooperation with other nations, they add.

The biggest question facing NASA is whether the 2004 vision of President George W. Bush to return humans to the moon by 2020 and then on to Mars is still alive. During the presidential campaign, Obama promised to build a large new rocket that can put humans back on the lunar surface, and Bolden told senators that is still in the cards. “We will go on to the moon,” he said. But he avoided mention of any timeline and left up in the air the second phase of Bush’s vision. “I want to go to Mars,” Bolden declared, before noting that this would be at least a 20-year venture.

Next month, a blue-ribbon panel chaired by retired aerospace executive Norman Augustine will lay out options for the replacement of the shuttle and whether it will be designed with a lunar base and a Mars mission in mind. But the more salient issue is how the White House will react.

The academies’ report makes some suggestions. America’s Future in Space: Aligning the Civil Space Program with National Needs argues that NASA needs shaking up so that “a disciplined space program can serve larger national imperatives.” Toward that end, the panel recommends that NASA create a nimble research shop modeled on the Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

In his Senate testimony, Bolden strongly backed a renewed emphasis on basic science and engineering, particularly aeronautics. His nominated deputy, Lori Garver, told legislators that she foresees “a great future in utilizing the space station for biomedical research” once the orbiting facility is completed. She said the research would focus on human diseases, an area largely ignored by the Bush Administration, and on preparing astronauts for long stints in space.

The academy report and Bolden also agree that NASA must revitalize its Earth-observation system and work with other countries to gather data on the planet’s environmental health. Strengthening international ties is essential on other fronts, too, NASA science chief Edward Weiler warned researchers meeting last week in Washington, D.C.: “On our own, we can’t do what people would like us to.”

Mars is a case in point. “We no longer have a viable Mars program,” Weiler confessed to a planetary science decadal study group. To help build one, NASA and the European Space Agency tentatively agreed early this month at a meeting in Plymouth, U.K., on a cooperative Mars robotic exploration effort. Although details from that meeting have yet to be made public, one NASA official said that finding life on the Red Planet is high on the list.

The NRC study also urged NASA to expand its roster of partners in human exploration beyond Europe, Japan, Canada, and Russia. Neither Bolden nor the White House has spoken publicly about this idea, but several Washington officials predicted that Obama’s efforts to strengthen relationships with other countries, notably China and India, will eventually include space cooperation.

The former shuttle pilot also expects help from the private sector. “The government cannot fund everything we want to do,” he said, calling for entrepreneurs to take a larger role.

Bolden, who grew up in South Carolina during segregation and who would be the first African American to lead NASA, faced no tough questions during the hearing. Nelson, who accompanied Bolden on a 1985 shuttle mission, called him an “overcomer” of personal, racial, and professional barriers. Concerns about his role as an aerospace consultant appear to have dissipated.

The Senate is expected to confirm Bolden easily although not necessarily before it goes on holiday in August. Once he takes the helm, Bolden’s biggest challenge will be to win support from the White House for a new approach to space exploration that fires the imagination of Congress and the public. If he fails, the agency may be left celebrating past triumphs rather than working toward future milestones.

^* With reporting by Richard A. Kerr.

Science 17 July 2009:
Vol. 325. no. 5938, p. 261
DOI: 10.1126/science.325_261

Science-2009-Lawler-Can_Bolden_Banish_NASA_Blues-261.pdf

Science-2009-Lawler-A_ReprieveCnand_Risk-719.pdf