Longshan

Collective name of the regional cultures of the Late Neolithic in northern China of the 3rd to mid-2nd millennia BC. The term refers to the culture of the Chengziyai type site, often distinguished as the Classic Longshan or Shandong Longshan, which may have survived to a time contemporary with the bronze-using Shang civilization. The Longshan period encompasses first metal use, warfare, compressed earth walled sites of Hangtu construction, abundant gray pottery, rectangular polished stone axes, and the delicate wheelturned black-burnished pottery of intricate shapes. A method of divination involving the heating of cattle bones and interpreting the cracks began here. In Honan, where its distribution overlaps that of the Yang Shao culture, Longshan is stratified above the former and below Shang material. Lungshanoid is another term used to describe these Neolithic cultures.

[Lung-shan]. A county in Shandong province, China, where a Neolithic site at Chengziyai was excavated in 1930-31. The name Longshan has since been applied in three distinct ways to Chinese Neolithic cultures: (1) It refers to the culture of the Chengziyai type site, often distinguished as the Classic Longshan or Shandong Represented at many Shandong sites including Weifang and Rizhao Liangchengzhen, the Shandong Longshan belongs to the late 3rd and early 2nd millennium bc, and may have survived to a time contemporary with the bronze-using Shang civilization. A large earthen wall at Chengziyai was built in the hangtu technique familiar from Shang walls and foundations. A small proportion of Shandong Longshan pottery is a very fine, thinly potted, wheel-made black ware; the Shandong Longshan is therefore sometimes called the Black Pottery culture, and this name has at times been used interchangeably with Longshan in the two broader senses explained below, even though the black pottery itself is essentially confined to Shandong province. (2) Especially in older publications, the name Longshan is applied to the entire Neolithic tradition of the east coast of China, of which the Shandong Longshan is a late and local manifestation. In this sense the Longshan (or Black Pottery) culture is on a par with Yangshao, the other main division of the Chinese Neolithic. More recent literature replaces Longshan in this broad sense with the names of earlier sites (e.g. Qinglian’gang) or substitutes a variety of less inclusive terms; to avoid confusion, the name ‘east-coast Neolithic’ is here used for Longshan in the broadest sense of the word. On present evidence the east-coast Neolithic was a tradition independent of the Yangshao,. centred in the lower Yangzi region. The earliest radiocarbon dates have come from Hemudu (early 5th millennium bc) together with clear evidence of rice cultivation. Later stages have been recognized in a series of sites south of the Yangzi (see Majiabang) and in another, related series in northern Jiangsu and Shandong, where the well-established cultural succession leads from the Qinglian’gang culture via Dawenkou to the Shandong Longshan (see Dadunzi, Qinglian’gang). The independence of the east-coast tradition from the Yangshao is clearly marked, most obviously in the cultivation of rice rather than millet; in the highly developed jade industry; and in the pottery repertoire, where painted decoration plays a minor role and the very distinctive shapes include a wide variety of stemmed or footed vessels, tripods, and, at a late stage, hollow-legged tripods (gui). The Neolithic of southeastern and south coastal China, characterized by cord-marked or comb-impressed pottery, may have a common origin with this east-coast tradition or alternatively may depend on some third independent area of agricultural origins (see Dapenkeng). (3) Lastly, the name Longshan is applied to cultures that differ fundamentally from those mentioned so far. These are the Henan Longshan (Hougang II), Shaanxi Longshan (Kexingzhuang II) and Gansu Longshan (Quia), which are not branches of the eastcoast Neolithic but products of its fusion with the local Yangshao traditions of central and western North China. The application of the term Longshan to these Yangshao successor cultures is unfortunate, since it has the appearance of grouping them together with the Shandong Longshan, which lacks any Yangshao component and is simply a late stage of the east-coast Neolithic. The westward movement of influences from the east coast, which did not replace the Yangshao tradition outright but altered it drastically, seems to have begun in the 4th millennium bc and continued through the 3rd millennium (see Dahe). The pottery of the Yangshao successor cultures is unpainted, often cord-marked, and heavily dependent on the eastcoast repertoire of shapes. Tripods with hollow legs (li, gui, and xiari) are prominent, and some of the shapes seem to imitate metal vessels. Throughout the cultural province of the Yangshao tradition, Longshan remains in this third sense lie above Yangshao (see Hou- Kexingzhuang, Quia). At a time when radiocarbon dates from the Yangshao site at Ban-po were by far the earliest known from the Chi nese Neolithic, this stratigraphy was taken by some scholars as evidence that the post-Yang-shao cultures of North China evolved out of the Yangshao and then spread east and south, bringing a Neolithic economy to the coastal provinces for the first time. This ‘nuclear theory’, which entailed the assumption that Neolithic remains on the coast were without exception young, even contemporary with the Bronze Age of North China, made little sense of the cultural differences separating the Yangshao and east-coast traditions. It was decisively disproved by radiocarbon dates showing the high antiquity of sites on the east coast and by stratigraphic sequences established there (see Dadunzi, Lungshanoid).