Science 21 August 2009:
Vol. 325. no. 5943, pp. 936 - 940
DOI: 10.1126/science.325_936

PDF

NEWS FOCUS

ARCHAEOLOGY IN CHINA:

Archaeologists Raise The Old With the New

Andrew Lawler

Researchers are working to transform China's development boom from a curse into a blessing for ancient sites.

Golden days. New archaeology museums, such as this one in Chengdu, are springing up all over China.

CREDIT: A. LAWLER/SCIENCE

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.

Past protector. Chengdu's Wang Yi saves sites.

CREDIT: COURTESY OF ROWAN FLAD

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 for preserving 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 terra-cotta army 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.

Big dig. A massive new north-south canal threatens hundreds of ancient settlements.

CREDIT: DAVID GRAY/REUTERS

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 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 21 August 2009:
Vol. 325. no. 5943, pp. 930 - 935
DOI: 10.1126/science.325_930

PDF

NEWS FOCUS

ARCHAEOLOGY IN CHINA:

Beyond the Yellow River: How China Became China

Andrew Lawler

The cradle of Chinese civilization was long considered to be the region around the middle Yellow River. But older and complex cultures from far-flung corners of the modern nation are now telling a different story about the origin of Chinese culture.

CREDIT: JINSHA SITE MUSEUM

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.

CREDITS: PHOTOS.COM; WIKIPEDIA; WIKIPEDIA; WIKIPEDIA; WIKIPEDIA

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.

Saving face. These 3000-year-old bronzes of a previously unknown style were recovered from Sanxingdui near Chengdu.

CREDIT: A. LAWLER, SCIENCE

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.

Heaven and Earth. The round bi and square cong used in Liangzhu became enduring Chinese symbols.

CREDITS (TOP TO BOTTOM): NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART; WIKIPEDIA

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.

CREDIT: J. NEWFIELD/SCIENCE

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.

Origin seekers. Beijing's Wang Wei (above) and Liangzhu's Liu Bin (below) see a more complex story of China's emergence.

CREDIT: COURTESY OF WANG WEI; COURTESY OF LIU BIN

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 first 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.

Stone Age. The Hongshan people of northeast China created fine jade works like these 5500 years ago.

CREDIT: LOWE ART MUSEUM/UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI; SMITHSONIAN/FREER GALLERY OF ART

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.

Face time. Enigmatic carved visages decorate this jade box from Liangzhu.

CREDIT: COURTESY OF LIU BIN

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."