Ancient Culture in Sichuan

　　In the last 20 years or so, not only has archaeological evidence pushed back the date of the earliest rice farming, city building, large-scale sculpture, and ritual practices in China, but it has also brought to light entirely unknown civilizations. For instance, in 1986 brick makers excavating clay in Sanxingdui, Sichuan Province, stumbled upon a treasure trove of bronzes and other objects dating to the 13th century B.C.E. Up to that point, it was almost universally believed that the only Bronze Age civilization in China was that of the Shang Dynasty, thought to be centered around Anyang, in the Yellow River Valley, far to the north of Sanxingdui. The Sanxingdui bronzes, which include the earliest examples of life-size human sculpture in China, met with the American public for the first time in two exhibitions, one that traveled to Washington, D.C., Houston, and San Francisco in 1999-2000, and another that traveled from the Seattle Art Museum to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and then on to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2001.

　　While the Yellow River Valley may have lost its claim to the only great Bronze Age civilization in China, another archaeological find, which was little-known to Western scholars until now, provides astonishing evidence of the extreme antiquity of permanent human settlement in the region. Discovered in 1962 by the late Zhu Zhi, former director of the Wuyang County Museum, the Neolithic site at Jiahu in Henan Province only began to be studied in earnest 15 years ago, and to date is only about 5 percent excavated. Jiahu includes more than 40 dwellings, 370 cellars, and more than 300 graves. The village was inhabited for roughly 1,300 years, starting in about 7,000 B.C.E.

　　In addition to evidence of rice cultivation and mystical divination, the site has yielded six intact musical instruments -- flutes made from the wing bones of the red-crowned crane. At 7,000-9,000 years old, as indicated by radiocarbon dating, these flutes may be the earliest extant and playable multi-note instruments in the world, yet they can produce a scale that covers a modern octave. Because the flutes were found in graves, researchers believe that music must have played an important role in religious rituals, such as death rites, at Jiahu. You can read about these findings in detail in the September, 1999 issue of the British science journal Nature, and you can even listen to an online recording of researcher Taoying Xu playing a more recent Chinese folk song on one of the flutes on the Brookhaven National Laboratory Web site. Like the Sanxingdui bronzes, the haunting sounds of the ancient Jiahu flute have contributed to a growing global interest in and an awareness of Chinese culture, as well as a new line of questioning as to the roots of modern civilization.