Banpo's era is an era when women's status is higher than men's. Women are in charge of agriculture and play a major role in production. They are the managers of the clan. Under their management, the ancestors created the first stage of human society-matriarchal clan society.
more than 6, years ago, there was an ancient clan tribe, Banpo, along the Weihe River. Here, the white deer reaches the south mountain in the east, and you can go hunting in the mountains all the year round; The north is an open plain, which is suitable for developing agriculture; The river flows through here, which provides Banpo people with a lot of aquatic resources and is also an excellent fishing place. According to archaeological experts' determination and physical analysis, banpo village was in a subtropical climate, with warm and humid climate and green trees all year round, which was very suitable for human development.
This Banpo tribe has a population of 4-6, and it was already a large-scale tribal gathering place in the society at that time. Banpo people's "village" is divided into three parts by a big trench. The eastern part of the ditch is a pottery-making area, the northern part is a collective cemetery, and the residential area is surrounded by Dawei ditch.
A big house with an area of about 16 square meters is the center of the whole Banpo tribe, with a large central square in front. This big house is the public building of the clan and tribe, and it is the place where people hold meetings and discuss affairs. The clan and tribe leaders and some people, old and young, live here. The big house and the square are the core of the whole residential area. There are a series of small houses around the big house, and the doors of all rooms are open towards the big house. The partition and layout are very orderly, and its architectural form also reflects the development process of primitive people from cave life to ground life. There are married women living in small houses and other clan men who are not sure to visit. Of course, there will be relatively stable pairing marriages between men and women, but it is absolutely different from monogamy later. Children still only know their mothers and don't know their fathers.
Archaeologists have also unearthed nearly 1, tools for production and life in Banpo, which can be divided into farm tools, hunting gear, fishing gear, cooking utensils, tableware and textile tools. According to its materials, it can be divided into stone, pottery and bone. Judging from these unearthed tools, Banpo people are not only engaged in farming, fishing and hunting, gathering, etc., but also engaged in production activities such as pottery, textile and tool manufacturing to survive.
In spring, Banpo people cut down trees with stone axes and stone tools, weed weeds, and set fire to the ground residues, then dig up the land with stone shovels, and dig holes with stone hoes and sharp sticks to plant millet. In autumn, Banpo people harvest crops with stone sickles or pottery sickles, and store the grain in public pits. If you need to eat these grains, peel them and crush them with a stone mill and a stone mill bar. In the ruins, the pots filled with millet by Banpo people and the relics of rotten millet were unearthed, which proved that Banpo people learned to cultivate millet.
In the middle of the village, there is also a place to keep kindling and eat "big pot rice". These kindling fires are in a large continuous pit, which consists of two parts: ellipse and circle, with a distance of 1 meter between them, and the fire paths are connected. There is a thick and hard braised soil layer on the side wall and bottom of the two stoves, because it has been used for a long time to shed such traces. These relics seem to make people see a picture, showing the life scene of the primitive society in which Banpo people work at sunrise and sing and dance around the bonfire at sunset.
Judging from the arrows of many stones or bones unearthed, Banpo people have learned to use bows and arrows and domesticated a large number of dogs. During the "slack season", men go hunting in the Woods with domesticated dogs. Women will go to the wild to collect the fruits of plants, or go to the river to fish and snails with their own harpoons, hooks and even nets. Domesticated pigs wandered leisurely in the pen. The girls sank into the river with a pointed bottom bottle invented by the tribesmen to draw water.
Banpo people are excellent craftsmen who can make all kinds of useful pottery. In Banpo society, the use of pottery occupies an extremely important position, and the molding method and clay strip plate building method have also been adopted in production technology. In the later period of Banpo era, Banpo people gradually trimmed the shape of the mouthparts with slow wheels, making the shape of the mouthparts more regular. Banpo people's pottery is mainly used for daily necessities, and they have made pottery retort for cooking. There is no difference in principle between this pottery retort and a steamer.
Banpo people have their own unique artistic pursuit and spiritual life. From the unearthed pottery, we can also see that they have abstract depicting symbols. Pottery is too monotonous, so they print some lines like sacks or coarse cloth on it. They have the original concepts of sequence and polygon; They made the oldest musical instrument, Tao Xun, and played a song in their spare time. Painted pottery is painted with swimming fish and running deer, which is a portrayal of fishing and hunting; There are abstract paintings with realistic patterns on the outer wall of pottery, and the strokes are fluent and sparse, which obviously has the function of decoration. This is the handicraft; They also depict their worship patterns on pottery, such as fish patterns on human faces, painted faces, fish in their mouths and triangular headdresses. Perhaps this is the totem or emblem of Banpo clan. All these, after 6 years, have become cultural relics and have been rediscovered.
The preliminary "weaving" is already under way. When it is cold, everyone wears fibers as thick as hemp thread to keep out the cold. When the weather is hot, our ancestors mostly bare their dark backs and pinned their unkempt hair on their heads with carefully ground bones.
The big family life of primitive tribes is warm and always threatened by the outside world. Wild animals, natural disasters and other disasters, large and small, always threaten the life of Banpo people. In order to resist wild animals and disasters, Banpo people built a large-scale fortifications-Dawei ditch around Banpo village. This trench is 7-8 meters wide, 5-6 meters deep, 1-3 meters in bottom diameter and over 3 meters long. The inner edge of the ditch is about 1 meter higher than the outer edge, and the slope of the ditch wall near the residential area is very large, while the outer wall is close to steep. This is obviously intentional when digging ditches. In the summer rain season, the accumulated water in the village can be diverted to the Daweigou; When there is a wild animal attack or foreign invasion, Daweigou has become the first protective barrier, which can be called the pioneer of later moats.
At first, the Daweigou should be built to defend against major disasters such as enemy attacks, wild animals' invasion and flooding. With the development of society, natural disasters and increasing clan conflicts, people's awareness of defense has also been continuously improved. Under the control of such a strong sense of defending their homes, later people kept innovating, and the ditches were gradually replaced by tall rammed earth moats. Later, people dug on the spot, built both walls and trenches, and filled the trenches with water to form a moat, thus forming a more perfect defense system. Daweigou gives Banpo people a sense of security away from the dangerous world outside. What can't be explained so far is how such a huge project was completed in the Banpo period when there were no means of transportation and only simple stone and bone excavation tools. Some people have calculated that the amount of waste soil in the whole Daweigou, today, needs more than 3,6 trips back and forth with a truck that can pull 3 cubic meters of soil.
whether Banpo people have ever fought with other tribes has always been a controversial issue in academic circles. Perhaps, villages and clans will also compete for prey, and there will also be contradictions and conflicts.
To the north of Daweigou is the tomb area, which is a complete clan cemetery. The dead in the tomb are generally buried with their heads facing west, mainly by one person, but also by two or four people; There are funerals on the back, and there are also burials bent over; There are straight limb burials, bent limb burials and urn coffin burials. Among the funeral customs of Banpo people, the funeral customs for children are very special. Most children in Banpo are not buried in the cemetery, but in urn coffins, which archaeology calls urn coffins burial, thus forming a major feature of Banpo people. Because of the poor natural conditions at that time, people's lives were very hard, and the epidemic of diseases, the child mortality rate was very high. After the child dies, adults first dig a hole in the ground near the house, put a big pottery urn or jar, put the child's body in it, cover it with a pottery bowl or basin, and cut a hole in it, which may be a passage for the soul of the deceased to enter and exit. Older children are buried with two earthenware jars. The child was buried near the house, which fully expressed the parents' attachment to their children. There are 73 children's urn coffins unearthed in Banpo.