Guo Dashun (former director of Liaoning Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, deputy director of Liaoning Provincial Department of Culture; He has presided over the archaeological excavations of Niuheliang, Dongshanzui and other sites, and is known as the "first person of Hongshan culture")
I am 85 years old. Although I retired in 1998, to this day, many jobs, meetings, and interviews still come to me, and people still pay attention to Hongshan culture.
The archaeological site that I remember the most in my life is in Niuheliang. When the clay statue of the goddess head was unearthed, it was facing the sky on its back, as if smiling. Especially the eyes of the jade chip, the eyes were bright, and everyone gathered around to look at it for a while. This is the first time we have seen the image of our ancestors five thousand years ago.
A thin child, a "not top-notch" Peking University student
When I was in junior high school, I was small, the shortest in the class, and I always failed physical education class, and I couldn't even go on the parallel bars. People are also more conservative. People keep their heads, I still have a bald head, and I wear a hat when I take photos. When I went to college, they said I was like a kid in a red scarf.
Probably influenced by my family, I like to read. I am a native of Xuanhua in Zhangjiakou, Hebei Province, and listening to my father, my grandfather was a local juan. The Liuchuan Academy was the predecessor of Xuanhua No. 300 Middle School. My father also worked in education. At the beginning of the founding of the People's Republic of China, my father donated more than 38 books and <> rooms of the ancestral home to Xuanhua No. <> Middle School. I study by myself, my family doesn't care much, mainly rely on school.
I studied Zhangjiakou No. 30 Middle School in middle school, which was the entrance examination of the whole special district, and I ranked eighth in the junior high school examination and sixth in high school, and the exam was always submitted in advance. In fact, I usually don't work very hard, but my memory is better, I remember Russian words quickly, I do homework quickly, and when I finish it, I play erhu in the classroom. Our class teacher said to me, "I just study and grasp the key points." At that time, Zhangjiakou was the capital of Chahar Province, only <> kilometers away from our home, but the transportation was inconvenient, and I only returned home once in half a year.
I matured late and didn't have any special ideas or hobbies. In 1957, I took the college entrance examination, and the trend at that time was to major in science and engineering. I have amblyopia in one eye, and the candidate's manual says that the eye is amblyopic and has no three-dimensional sense, and I will suffer a loss when I report to the science and engineering major, so I will temporarily change it to liberal arts. As soon as I saw that there were not many majors in the liberal arts, I enrolled in history. At that time, Chahar Province was abolished, and our family moved to Baoding, the capital of Hebei Province. When I got home, the acceptance letter from Peking University came.
After finishing my freshman year in the history department of Peking University, when it was time to divide my major, a senior recommended me to choose archaeology. I thought that archaeology might be able to do more practical things than reading literature, so I reported it. Later, it turned out that it was indeed during the archaeological internship, which strengthened my understanding of the profession.
Various cultures converge in the middle to form China's "Zhong"
To say that the only regret of my archaeological work in this life is that I have not learned foreign languages well and cannot promote the results of archaeological research well. When we were in graduate school, we only started learning English, and just after learning phonetic transcription for a year, we went out for an archaeology internship.
Our class is the first class of Peking University to receive systematic archaeology training, and we have to go through production internship, write academic year papers, and then carry out graduation internships and write graduation theses. My two internships were at the Wangwan site in Luoyang, Henan, which spanned a relatively large period of time, transitioning from the Yangshao culture to the Longshan culture, with obvious characteristics and rich artifacts unearthed. I was very impressed with this batch of materials, but a deeper understanding came later.
In 1962, I was admitted to Mr. Su Bingqi's graduate school to delve into Neolithic archaeology. At that time, Mr. Su's theory of cultural flora types in Chinese archaeology had not yet been formally proposed, but we were already influenced by this education.
During my graduate internship, I went to Shandong to sort out the materials of the Dawenkou site. This site and the ruins of King's Bay are close in time, one east and one west. The "Dingdou Pot" pottery assemblage found in the Wangwan site is the main feature of the Dawenkou culture, and according to the evolutionary process, the Luoyang Wangwan site was influenced by the Dawenkou culture in Shandong.
At that time, the "Central Plains Center Theory" was prevalent in Chinese archaeology, believing that the Yangshao culture in the Central Plains had the earliest origin and had the greatest impact on the surrounding areas. In 1965, Mr. Su Bingqi published the famous article "Some Questions About Yangshao Culture", which put forward the view of "the East influencing the Central Plains", which was very innovative at that time. He believes that China's "Zhong" is not a candle that shines around, but like an axle, various cultures gather in the middle, and the convergence reflects the "Zhong".
After I came to work in Liaoning, I gradually realized this idea in practice, which influenced my archaeological work throughout my life.
Is Liaoning "unexaminable"
In 1968, when I was assigned to work in the Liaoning Provincial Museum, I was a little "blind". When we went to school, we all felt that Liaoning was "unexaminable". Apart from the site of a Western Han village, little is known about other archaeological materials in Liaoning. With the resumption of business work, I first came into contact with a batch of Shang Zhou bronzes from the cellar, and then excavated a tomb from the Western Zhou Dynasty, which further confirmed the age of the bronzes, and I also felt that Liaoning archaeology "has some meaning".
The historian Fu Sinian mentioned earlier that the Shang culture originated in the northeast. The results of our excavations also point to this - in the earlier Xiajiadian lower cultural sites, we also saw some painted pottery patterns similar to Shang dynasty bronze patterns, including tombs with clear hierarchies, and the customs of building at the site were relatively mature. This shows that the ancient culture of the northern region has its own development process, the level may not be lower than the Central Plains, and even interact with the Central Plains, it is not just passively accepting the influence of the Central Plains culture.
In 1979, Liaoning carried out a census of cultural relics, and we discovered the Dongshanzui site. The site of a symmetrical stone building with a central axis in the north and south has been excavated, as well as a dragon-shaped jade ornament and two small statues of pregnant women – all unprecedented. I thought about the origin of civilization.
This is the first sacrificial site related to female worship in China, and it is also the first official archaeological excavation of sacrificial sites by Neolithic archaeology in China. Human statues have been unearthed in Europe since the late Paleolithic period, and hundreds of Neolithic sites have been excavated in our country, but they have never been found. Mr. Yu Weichao, then director of the China Museum of History, said at the on-site meeting in Dongshanzui, "This is a discovery that the archaeological community has been waiting for for 30 years."
In 1981, Mr. Sun Shoudao and I co-wrote an article called "The Origin of the Primitive Civilization and the Dragon in the Liao River Valley", which advanced the era of the origin of Chinese civilization from <>,<> years ago to <>,<> years. The issue was sensitive at the time, and we encountered some setbacks when we raised it, and the manuscript was not included in the proceedings. At that time, the criterion for judging the origin of civilization was still the three elements of metal, writing and city. All three are called the origin of civilization. But we believe that Chinese civilization has its own characteristics.
Mr. Zhang Guangzhi, a Chinese archaeologist in the United States, once proposed that the path taken by the origin of Chinese civilization is different from that of the West, which entered civilized society mainly by developing technology and trade, while the East, represented by China, has a cosmological view of different levels of heaven, earth, gods and people, and enters civilized society by obtaining political power through gods.
The dragon is one of the most important symbols of the origin of Chinese civilization. In 1971, Chifeng discovered the famous dark green jade dragon, and Dongshanzui also unearthed dragon-shaped jade ornaments, indicating that their faith has matured, which is not something that a primitive society can have, but a product of civilized society.
After that, some jade artifacts were found one after another, but they could not find the land, and they could not see the exact stratigraphic relationship, so they could not determine the date, and could only speculate that they were cultural relics from the Hongshan culture period. In the process of finding these jade artifacts out of the land, we found the ruins of Niuheliang. The article we wrote, "The Origin of the Primitive Civilization and the Dragon in the Liao River Valley", was also published in the journal "Cultural Relics".
Find Niuhe Liang and see ancestors from 5,000 years ago
In 1981, when I gave training on cultural relics census in Jianping County, Chaoyang City, Liaoning Province, a township cultural station manager who participated in the training told me that the hometown of his fellow villager in Majiagou Village had a "jade pen holder" in his home. We borrowed a couple of bicycles, rode 15 kilometers to see it, and when we saw it, we put it on his cabinet with a few pens in it. I looked, what kind of pen holder is this, isn't this the diagonal barrel jade we are looking for? This is one of the representative jade objects of the Hongshan culture!
As soon as I asked about the land, the villagers led us to a mountain beam on the south side of National Highway 101 in the west of the village, which was the Niuhe Liang that later revealed the origin of China's <>,<>-year-old civilization.
Since 1983, I have been conducting archaeological excavations at the Niuheliang site. In this group of sites, we have successively discovered important sites such as temples of goddesses, altars, and stone cairns. Each of these new discoveries is extremely important, but the most memorable for me is the clay sculpture of the head of the goddess.
At that time, our archaeological team lived in the house of our fellow villagers, and there were many newspapers pasted on the walls. There is a picture on the top of the head that was published in the "Liaoning Daily" that year, reporting that a singer held a concert and sang a song, the lyrics were: "A handful of loess molds into thousands of you and me, the vein is the Great Wall, the artery is the Yellow River, five thousand years of culture is an endless pulse, remind you, remind me, we have a name called China." ”
I looked, "a handful of loess", isn't this goddess avatar the ancestor of our loess made? Mr. Su Bingqi called her the "female ancestor of the Hongshan people" and the "common ancestor of China". There is no traditional religion in China, and ancestor worship tied by blood is the main form of Chinese belief and worship rituals. The religious belief in the late Hongshan culture has entered the stage of ancestor worship from nature worship and totem worship.
At the same time, we also found a three-story circular heavenly sacrifice site in Niuheliang, this altar and the round mound of Dongshanzui are located in the southern part of the site, and the square building temple site is in the northern part of the site. This layout of the north temple and the south altar was inherited by successive Chinese dynasties until the city of Beijing in the Ming and Qing dynasties.
Later, Mr. Su Bingqi associated the "altar temple tomb" in Niuheliang with the Temple of Heaven, the Taimiao Temple and the Ming Tombs in Beijing during the Ming and Qing dynasties, and believed that the "altar temple tomb" was a symbol of Chinese civilization. He set no standards and ignored concepts, believing that civilization is about transmission. All other civilizations in the world have been broken, but the Chinese civilization is continuing, and this continuous root is here. Hongshan culture is the "straight root system" in the general root system of the big tree of Chinese civilization.
In this way, the northeast region is not only "ancient to examine", but also has its own characteristics, and sometimes even walks ahead. I have worked and lived in Northeast China for more than 50 years, and I have started a family in Shenyang, and I still live in Shenyang. Discussions on the origins of Chinese civilization are still ongoing, and I am an early initiator, participant and witness to this issue.
Now I rarely go to archaeological sites, but I still think in my head. At the beginning of this month, I also gave a lecture about the Liaohe civilization from the Red Mountains to the Manchus, who live in the northeast forest and grassland area, live by gathering fish and hunting, are mobile, open culture, dependent on nature, and respect nature. The people of Hongshan are like this, they absorb foreign factors and become their own, and they are not xenophobic or taboo. The Manchus were the same, after entering the customs, they basically inherited the city of Beijing in the Ming Dynasty, and did not carry out major demolition and reform.
When Mr. Su Bingqi talked about the archaeological search for roots, he compared my hometown Zhangjiakou Xuanhua to "Sanchakou", because the Hongshan culture, Yangshao culture and Hetao ancient culture have been contacted and exchanged in this area. From school, work to my later years, I have been exploring the roots of Chinese national culture - it is also a subject that generations of scholars have been struggling to seek, it is really a fate, and every time I think of this, my heart is full of happiness.
(Du Jiabing, trainee reporter of China Youth Daily and China Youth Network, compiled according to Guo Dashun's oral account)