Dawenkou culture, about 6000 years ago, belongs to the late Neolithic period and is the predecessor of Longshan culture in Shandong Province. As a powerful representative of Neolithic culture, Dawenkou culture has its own cultural patent, which has a number of unique exquisite pottery, developed handicraft processing technology and unique customs different from other regions.
Pottery is the main symbol of the cultural connotation of Dawenkou. In addition to the common red, gray and black pottery, there are also white pottery, which is very different. Pottery is often decorated with holes, lines, nose buttons, etc. , and there are gorgeous painted pottery and simple Zhu painted pottery. Perhaps to meet the actual needs of life, or to follow a certain historical tradition, the tripod and foot winder here are very developed, and there are various types of tripod and pot-shaped tripod, charity-shaped tripod, pot-shaped tripod, solid tripod and foot-wrapped tripod. In Dawenkou people's ideal, it seems that all vessels should be fitted with legs (feet), which has become a feature of this culture. In addition, leaky pots, beans, back pots, cups and big mouth statues also have strong regional characteristics, which are isomorphic with Ding and Zi, forming a pottery group with complete culture in Dawenkou.
The handicraft industry of Dawenkou culture is very developed, and professional craftsmen appeared obviously during this period. All kinds of primitive sacrificial articles, from pottery utensils used in daily life to tools used in production to obviously non-practical utensils, were created from the dexterous hands of Dawenkou people, and their technical proficiency was no less than that of later generations. Dawenkou people began to use the wheel system technology in the process of pottery making. At this time, the thin-walled polished black pottery high-handle cup represents the highest level of pottery-making technology in this period, which was inherited and developed by the later Longshan culture in Shandong Province, and produced exquisite eggshell black pottery, which surprised the world. Dawenkou culture also has animal-shaped pottery, which reflects the proficiency of technology and the prosperity of pottery-making industry, such as pig, dog and turtle-shaped containers, among which animal-shaped hanging beams can be called treasures in the history of arts and crafts.
The jade production industry of Dawenkou culture is also relatively developed, and the perforation technology is widely used. Usually choose high hardness opal, rhyolite and other stone materials. Stone tools are regular in shape and rich in variety. In some tombs, complete sets of large, medium and small stones are common, and exquisite jade articles and a large number of jade ornaments have appeared.
Dawenkou people have excellent bone-making skills. Exquisite small bone carvings are often unearthed in tombs, such as carved beads, dental ornaments with pig's head patterns, and hooks with slender patterns on the handles. The carving technology and inlaying technology are relatively mature, among which the through-carved ivory comb, petal-shaped ivory cylinder and inlaid turquoise bone carving cylinder all represent the highest level of bone-making technology in China in Neolithic Age.
The residents of painted pottery beans Dawenkou culture have some unique customs. Primitive people prevailed the custom of artificial deformation of occipital bone and extraction of teeth by teenagers, and generally extracted a pair of maxillary lateral teeth. They usually like to roll in their mouths with small stone balls or small pottery balls in their mouths every day. Because of having these small objects for a long time, some people's molars have been seriously worn or even retracted, and their mandibles are deformed, which is not only strange but also full of mystery. In addition, the teeth, teeth hooks, tortoise shells and other items buried with the deceased are also very rare in other Neolithic cultures.
Dawenkou people's economy is dominated by primitive agriculture, mainly planting millet. Cubic meters of rotten millet were unearthed in the granary in the form of pits in the ruins, indicating that the grain output at this time was considerable. Dawenkou people also have tools made of stone tools, such as shovels, axes, knives, hoes and chisels. And bone sickles, mussel sickles, stone pestles and stone grinding rods used for processing grains. Among them, shoulder stone shovel, segmented stone shovel, stone pick, staghorn hoe and other tools mark the improvement of agricultural production scale. The animal husbandry of Dawenkou people is also relatively developed. The bones of pigs, dogs, cows, chickens and other livestock and poultry have been unearthed in the site, and the custom of burying pigs' mandibles, pig heads, semi-pigs and even whole pigs is very popular. More than one-third of the pig tombs buried with him are buried in the cemetery, and there are more than 30 pigs' mandibles buried with him. On the one hand, it shows that raising pigs is very common at this time, and at the same time, Dawenkou people have a soft spot for pigs, and they can't live without pigs after death. It has a strong religious significance. Dawenkou people also prey on a large number of game such as roe deer, sika deer, raccoon dog and elk, as well as a large number of aquatic animals such as Chinese alligators, fish, turtles, turtles and mussels.
Dawenkou cultural settlement is relatively mature. In addition to simple small single-room buildings, large-scale townhouses can also be built. A large settlement, surrounded by a moat, is twenty or thirty meters wide and five or six meters deep. There are many squares, houses, animal pits and sacrificial pits in the settlement. Construction sites are built around the center of the site, with two, four or five rooms in a row. The building site is a shallow crypt, which consists of main wall, partition wall, door, living surface, indoor platform and indoor column, with a general area of 10 square meter and the largest being nearly 30 square meters. The wall is made of wood and mud and barbecued at the same time as the ground. The walls are smooth, and some are covered with a layer of white ash. The door faces south, single or double.
Most of Dawenkou cultural tombs are pit tombs, and a few tombs are unclear. Graveyards are often used for a long time. In some areas, graves are stacked on top of each other for nearly ten stories, dating back at least a thousand years. The scale, burial tools and funerary objects of tombs show the difference between the rich and the poor. Some tombs are simple and narrow, with few or no funerary objects, while others are spacious and complicated. The deceased was wearing exquisite jade ornaments, jade shovels, ivory utensils and 100 pieces of exquisite pottery, and there may be animal bones, pig heads and piles of crocodile scales left over from crocodile drums. The burial style is generally a single straight limb burial, but also a bent body burial, a bent limb burial, and a second burial. Also found a broken head burial. The deceased is a woman with fetal bone implantation in the pelvis, such as a pregnant woman who died during childbirth. There is also a burial ceremony in which the arms and legs of the deceased are folded on the chest, which may be a way to deal with the fierce deceased. Some tombs have no owners, and their heads are separated, or the bodies have no heads but rich funerary objects, which may be a kind of reburial for the leaders or members who died for the benefit of the clan in the tribal war. Tombs are divided into one burial and two burials. Most of them are of the same sex, and there are more than 20 people buried together.
In the early Dawenkou culture, the polarization between the rich and the poor was not obvious. Many people in the tomb were buried together, and the kinship between clan members was relatively strong, which was roughly at the end of matriarchal clan society. In the later period, handicrafts developed independently from agriculture, and the gap between the rich and the poor was obvious. Private ownership gradually formed, patriarchy was established, and it completely entered the patriarchal society. Its discovery and its relationship with the inheritance of Longshan culture in Shandong prove that Shandong and northern Jiangsu were at that time. It is a self-contained cultural area with Dawenkou culture and Shandong Longshan culture as the main body, and it is an element in the origin of the pluralistic center of ancient civilization in China.