The Liangzhu Culture: Its Discovery and its Jades

The discovery of neolithic remains in 1936 at a place called Liangzhu near Hangzhou was the first evidence of a culture which in recent decades has revolutionized the prehistory of the lower Yangzi region. The great antiquity of sites in this region was established in the late 1960s by radiocarbon dating, which overthrew the prevailing theory that the agricultural way of life originated at a single center of innovation in the Yellow River valley and diffused to the east coast only in historic times. Subsequent archaeological work not only established the local sequence of neolithic cultures but also, at a series of major Liangzhu sites, revealed extravagantly furnished burials whose wealth raises puzzling question about the structure of Liangzhu society. Chief among the furnishings of these graves are large numbers of jades — objects remarkable for their strange shapes and designs and even more remarkable for their superlative workmanship. The first section of this essay reviews the history of Liangzhu archaeology, connecting it with the changes of thinking that Chinese neolithic archaeology has undergone in the past half century. The second section discusses a few of the issues raised by Liangzhu jades: material sources, the origin of the bi and cong shapes, and the relation between Liangzhu jades and Shang jades.