Hongshan Culture is an agricultural culture created by tribal groups operating in the north of Yanshan Mountain and in the upper reaches of the Daling River and Liao River five or six thousand years ago. Hongshan Culture comprehensively reflects the cultural characteristics and connotations of the Neolithic Age in northern my country. Later, sites with similar or identical cultural characteristics to the Hongshan site in Chifeng were discovered in nearby areas, collectively known as the Hongshan culture. So far, nearly a thousand sites have been discovered and determined to belong to this cultural system, scattered across the western region of Liaoning. In China's voluminous classics, the history of Chinese civilization has always been regarded as 5,000 years ago. However, from an archaeological perspective, its underground evidence can only be traced back to 4,000 years - the Hongshan Culture provides physical proof of the history of civilization in the first 1,000 years.
Since Qin Shihuang divided the land of China into north and south with the Great Wall, the Central Plains has been the cradle of civilization of the Chinese nation, which has become an indisputable fact for more than 2,000 years - Hongshan Culture has been revealed to the world and is known as barbaric. The north of China is also the birthplace of Chinese civilization.
——The Hongshan Culture, with its splendid ancient civilization, has verified and reversed the thinking patterns of the Chinese people for thousands of years.
The Hongshan Culture refers to the area where Chinese ancestors, between five and six thousand years ago, stretched from the Xiliao River Basin in the north to the Daling River Basin and the northern shore of the Bohai Bay in the south, and extended to the south of Yanshan Mountain. Inside, a primitive cultural form created in the late Neolithic Age. It was first discovered in 1935 in Hongshanhou Village, a suburb of Chifeng City, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, and was officially named in 1955. Subsequent sites with the same or similar cultural characteristics are collectively referred to as "Hongshan Culture".
The representative of Hongshan Culture is Niuheliang.
Niuheliang is located at the junction of Jianping County and Lingyuan City, between Daling River and Laoha River. It is a three-loess mountain ridge spreading in the Nuruerhu Valley. Since the Hongshan Culture was discovered and excavated here more than 20 years ago, these three crude characters have become full of atmosphere and become world-famous almost overnight.
The goddess temple is located in the center of the entire site, covering an area of ??75 square meters. It is now enclosed and covered with eight beams. Inside the tent is just a rectangular open space with undulating surfaces, and traces of excavations remain on the hard yellow soil. Pine trees from far and near whistled outside the tent, making it look empty and desolate.
Due to technological deficiencies, only a partial trial excavation was conducted on the Temple of the Goddess. It was then covered with loess and has been protected to this day. As for when enough technical support will be available, no one can tell.
During the trial excavation, red pottery painted murals and fragments of sacrificial vessels were unearthed from the Temple of the Goddess, as well as clay sculptures of bear claws, eagle claws and bird wings. What shocks the world the most is the fragments of the goddess statue, which belong to six individuals and include goddess heads, arms, legs, noses and ears of different sizes. The goddess's head is missing half of her ear, but her entire facial expression is still vivid. The green jade eyes are deeply sunken into the eye sockets, making the brow bones and cheekbones appear very high. The mouth is a bit special, it is pulled back slightly, as if smiling slightly.
The Niuheliang Goddess Temple is the earliest temple in China discovered by the archaeological community; the goddess statue in the Goddess Temple is the first time that hundreds of millions of descendants of Yan and Huang have seen their ancestors who were shaped from soil 5,000 years ago. image. The glorious moment when the goddess's head saw the sun again was captured by a photographer from the Liaoning Provincial Museum. The photo was titled "Historic Meeting Five Thousand Years Later" and was published in newspapers and periodicals at home and abroad. The descendants are noisy, but the ancestors are calm and composed.
Surrounding the goddess temple and built on the top of each hill are many stone tombs and altars. The so-called stone tomb is a tomb built with stone slabs. The tomb chamber, tomb cover, tomb bottom and tomb boundaries are all made of stone slabs. The altar is an ancillary facility of the cairn. Stone tombs are one of the characteristics of the Hongshan Culture. They are completely different from the Neolithic tombs in North China and the Central Plains of China, which were mainly earth pits.
Looking at all the sites excavated in Niuheliang, each group of stone mounds has small tombs surrounding a large central tomb, and stone walls are built around them to form a frame. The tomb is covered with stone and earth, forming a towering hilltop. The large tombs are all for men, and their grave goods are obviously more numerous than those of the surrounding small tombs. The ancients of the Hongshan culture 5,000 years ago undoubtedly learned to distinguish and treat them differently, thus forming the prototype of class and the original embryo of civilization.
The tombs of the Hongshan Culture have another unique feature, that is, only jade objects are buried with them. This is also completely different from the common burial of pottery in Neolithic tombs in the Central Plains. In addition to the common jade bracelets, jade hoops, jade bis, etc., the jade articles in the tombs are more eye-catching including jade turtles, jade phoenixes, and jade figures. And its most eye-catching highlight is the Jade Pig Dragon.
Niusheliang Tomb No. 4 is that of an adult male. There are not many burial objects, only three. However, except for a jade hoop-shaped object placed under the head, the other two are precious jade pigs. dragon. Two jade dragons lie in the human chest, one big and one small, the big one is a little more than 10 centimeters, and the small one is 6 or 7 centimeters at best; one is green and the other is white, the green one is clear and shining, the white one is slightly yellow; the head is facing Next, sleep back to back. The whole body is chubby, the head is enlarged, the ears are plump, there are vivid wrinkles on the mouth and the bridge of the nose, and the two big round eyes are slightly protruding, as if they are looking at people intently. Its appearance is similar to the Pig Head Mountain opposite the Goddess Temple.
The dragon is the original plot of the descendants of Yan and Huang. It is difficult to trace its origin when exactly it originated and what it became. The most popular view has always been that of Mr. Wen Yiduo. Mr. Wen believes that the dragon is composed of snakes as its main body, combined with the feet of beasts, the head of a horse, the tail of a hyena, the antlers of a deer, the claws of a dog, the scales and whiskers of a fish - there is no shadow of a pig in it.
In fact, ever since the first jade dragon was discovered, its naming has been a source of controversy in the archaeological community. Some people think it looks like a deer, some think it looks like a bear, the larvae of a scarab beetle, or even a fetus, or the Taoist yin and yang fish, and so on. Until October 21, 2003, at the Xinglongwa Cultural Site in Aohan Banner, Inner Mongolia, which was more than 8,000 years ago, an S-shaped animal composed of stones and pottery shards was unearthed, lying quietly in an ash pit, perfectly alive A giant dragon with a wild boar skull resting on its head.
——The "Jade Pig Dragon" became famous all over the world, and it was believed that it was not just an ornament, but a totem.
Jade pig dragons can be roughly divided into two categories. One type is thin and thin, with long and flying manes. It is shaped like the English letter "C" and is called "C-shaped dragon". Another site of Hongshan Culture - The large jade dragon unearthed from Talla, Sanxing, Inner Mongolia belongs to this type; the other type has a thick ring body and a pig-like image, which is called "jade pig dragon". The jade dragons unearthed from Niuheliang all belong to this category.
The Hongshan Culture extends from Kezuo Middle Banner and Kailu County in the Xiliao River and Xilamulun River basins in the north, to Balin Zuo Banner, Balin Right Banner, and Sanxingtala, and then to the upper reaches of the Liao River and Lao The cultural itinerary of Fuxin, Chifeng, Kazuo and Jianping in the Hahe and Daling river basins has gradually moved southward, all the way to Panjin at the mouth of the Liaohe River.
Panjin discovered seven Hongshan Cultural relics in the suburbs of the city in 1982, and collected fragments of painted pottery, microstone tools, jade axes, ground stone axes, net pendants, etc. from the surface. However, they have not been excavated so far. There is no more harvest - the Hongshan culture, which has been glorious for thousands of years, has disappeared north of the Great Wall.
However, once the Hongshan Culture was discovered, its cultural characteristics were quickly captured by the world.
In addition to the Hongshan Culture, the prehistoric cultures in China where jade artifacts were unearthed include the Liangzhu Culture in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. Both have the characteristics of using jade as burial objects. Their jade bis, jade rings, jade turtles, jade birds and other jade objects all have certain similarities, especially the "C" shaped dragon head of the Hongshan Culture and the big-eyed beast of the Liangzhu Culture. The facial patterns have the same basic components.
Some scholars used this as a basis to speculate that after the ancestors of Hongshan moved to Panjin in the later period, they moved southward along the coastline of the Bohai Bay and continued to migrate to the Central Plains. As a result, the cultural landscape of the lower reaches of the Yangtze River changed dramatically and the cultural landscape of the lower reaches of the Yangtze River was integrated. Many Hongshan Culture traditions of worshiping jade eventually formed the Liangzhu Culture.
This leads to a conclusion that is shocking to the world: the more developed cultures in prehistory were not the Hemudu Culture in the Yangtze River Basin and the Yangyun Culture in the Yellow River Basin, but the Hongshan Culture in the Liaohe River Basin in northern China. In addition to the Yangtze River and the Yellow River, the Liao River has more sufficient reasons and evidence to become the mother river of the Chinese nation.