Its scope is centered on Taishan area, starting from the coast of the Yellow Sea in the east, east of Luxi Plain in the west, south of Bohai Sea in the north and Huaibei area in Anhui Province in the south. There are also a few Dawenkou cultural relics in Henan Province.
Dawenkou culture pushed forward the history of primitive culture in the lower reaches of the Yellow River in China from Longshan culture for more than 2000 years, and discovered the origin of Longshan culture in Shandong, which provided important clues for the study of primitive culture in Huanghuai basin and coastal areas of Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Jiangsu. There is Hemudu culture in the Yangtze River basin, and * * * is called the origin of Chinese civilization.
Dawenkou, located on the north bank of Dawenkou River, has been a famous "Wenyangtian" since ancient times, with fertile soil, rich water resources and rich underground resources.
Dawenkou cultural site is rich in connotation, including tombs, houses and burial pits. , divided into three periods: early, middle and late. Red pottery dominated in the early stage, and the proportion of gray and black increased in the later stage, resulting in white pottery and eggshell pottery.
Dawenkou culture is mainly based on agricultural production, and agriculture is mainly based on planting millet. It also manages animal husbandry, supplemented by hunting and fishing. Carbonized millet was once found in a cave in Sanlihe site. There are also a large number of cattle, sheep, pigs, dogs and other livestock bones.
There are many village sites of different sizes in Dawenkou cultural site. These villages are located on platforms near the river banks and on highlands in the plains. Most houses are ground buildings, but there are also a few houses with semi-basements.
Chengzi site has a square house of Dawenkou culture, with the door facing south. The construction method is to dig a foundation groove on the floor first, and fill and tamp the foundation groove with soil. There are dense column holes in the wall foundation and four column holes in the room.
There are ceramic house models in Dawenkou cultural tombs in Dadunzi, which provide quite vivid models of Dawenkou cultural houses.
The ash pits of Dawenkou culture include circular vertical holes and oval vertical holes, which may be pits for storing things. There are also irregular ash pits with mouths larger than the bottom.
The pottery-making technology of Dawenkou culture has been greatly improved. Mainly hand-made, it later developed into wheel pottery, and the firing temperature ranged from 900 degrees to 1000 degrees. There are ding, Jing, Jing, Dou, Zun, single-ear cup, cup-shaped, high-necked jar, back pot and so on.
Many pottery surface films are shiny, and the patterns are scratches, chords, baskets, circles, triangles, carved holes and so on. Painted pottery is rare, but it is very distinctive. There are three colors: red, black and white, and the patterns are dots, geometric patterns, flowers and leaves.
The sculptures and handicrafts of Dawenkou culture are not only numerous, but also of high artistic level, and most of them are buried tombs. Sculptures include ivory carving tubes, ivory cong, ivory combs, carved bone beads, bone carving tubes, bone combs, tooth carvings, turquoise-embedded bone tubes, carved bone knives, perforated jade shovels, jade beads and pottery animals. These sculptures are beautifully made and beautifully shaped, which are quite distinctive works of art in Dawenkou culture.
The production tools include beautifully polished stone axe, stone hairpin, stone chisel and bone grinder, and the fine grinding of bone needles can be comparable to today.
During the Dawenkou culture period, the gender of workers in social production changed greatly. After the middle period, the production tools such as stone shovels, axes and spears were mainly men, and the spinning wheels were mainly women.
This shows that men have become the main undertakers of social production, especially agricultural production, and women are engaged in housework such as textiles. The society has developed from the matriarchal clan commune stage to the paternal clan commune stage.
In the late Dawenkou culture, with the development of production, private ownership appeared. Some Dawenkou tombs contain a large number of pig heads and pig jawbones, which should be the private property of the tomb owner before his death. In addition, the private property buried with him also includes pottery, production tools and various decorations.
The emergence and development of private ownership will inevitably lead to polarization between the rich and the poor, and there will be polarization between the rich and the poor within the clan. The tombs in the middle and late Dawenkou culture clearly reflect this evolution. Judging from the scale of tombs, there are big tombs and small tombs. Judging from the funerary objects, the difference is even greater, indicating that the polarization between the rich and the poor has been very significant.
Black pottery and white pottery are two new varieties in the pottery industry in the middle and late Dawenkou culture, reflecting the remarkable progress of pottery technology at that time. At this time, the pottery has been made by a fast-rotating pottery cart.
The appearance of white pottery is of great significance, and some of them have patterns, which laid a technical foundation for the production of porcelain in the future.
During Dawenkou culture period, handicraft economy also developed to a higher level. Ceramic industry and jade manufacturing industry are separated from agriculture and become independent economic sectors.
At that time, artificial deformation of occipital bone and extraction of a pair of lateral incisors in adolescence were popular among residents, and some of them contained small stone balls or ceramic balls in their mouths for a long time, causing mandibular retraction deformation. It is also popular to put a perforated tortoise shell on the waist of the deceased, who holds a tooth or hook-shaped tooth. These customs are rare in other prehistoric cultures in China.
Many depicting symbols in Dawenkou culture may be ancient hieroglyphics. Pottery statues were also found in Lingyang River, Dazhu Village, Hangtou and Zhucheng Qianzhai in Juxian County.
The tombs of Dawenkou culture are mostly buried in centralized cemeteries. The graves in each cemetery are arranged in an orderly way, and the heads of the dead are the same. Most of the tombs are rectangular vertical pits, some only have coffins, but there are also coffins. The burial style is generally a straight limb, and there are also two or more people buried together. Many people are buried together, ranging from 3 to 23 people.
In the tombs of the late Dawenkou culture, there appeared the joint burial of husband and wife and the joint burial of husband and wife with children, which marked the end of matriarchal society and began or entered the patriarchal clan society.