Well-fired, stamp-impressed pottery characteristic of 2nd-millennium BC sites in south and southeastern China. The ‘Geometric pottery cultures’ seem to have grown out of local Neolithic predecessors; in and near Shanghai, for instance, Geometric pottery levels overlie Liangzhu remains. These cultures probably arose too early to have been formed under Shang influence, as was once assumed, but they were partly coeval with the Bronze Age of North China. The Geometric pottery culture of southern Jiangsu and central Anhui, known as the Hushu culture, clearly borrowed its primitive bronze metallurgy from more civilized Shang centres, and in the same region the characteristic pottery designs were copied in metal on a few bronze vessels of Western Zhou date (seeTuNXi).
The Macmillan dictionary of archaeology, Ruth D. Whitehouse, 1983Copied