Early pyramid site in North China

[Duncan Head]

I missed this when it came out in August:

https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/archaeology/pyramid-of-eyes-discovered-at-heart-of-4300yearold-city-in-northern-china/news-story/c14aca02eb9c06f620cf938d5cefddfe

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/when-peripheries-were-centres-a-preliminary-study-of-the-shimaocentred-polity-in-the-loess-highland-china/EA48B7FEF5512D41D615DC3480DE0DDC

http://www.ancientpages.com/2015/08/22/first-chinese-murals-found-in-shimao-ruins-are-more-than-4000-years-old/ - the murals don't seem to be pictorial

Basically this is a site previously thought to have been much later; but it turns out on examination to have been 4,300 years old (elsewhere, it lasted for 500 years - so is 4,300 the date of the site's founding or its collapse?) - so c. 2,300 BC.

I'm not sure about the description in one article as "bronze age": normally "bronze age" in China is used for the period starting with the Erlitou culture, which starts about 2000 BC and is sometimes equated with the legendary Xia culture - though IIRC there are some older bronze artefacts. These articles don't say what bronze was found at Shimao and the "murals" article associates it with the Longshan, which is a basically Neolithic culture.

But stone or bronze, this is a previously-unknown city-building, skull-collecting culture in what we normally think of as the "barbarian fringe" of North China, which appears to predate the earliest Chinese dynasties.

[Andreas Johansson]

Calling it a "pyramid" seems a tad creative - it seems to be just a terraced hill.

But an undeniably neat find nevertheless.