Yangshao culture
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The Yangshao culture existed along the middle and lower Yellow River from about 5000 to 3000 BCE and was one of the great painted-pottery traditions of Neolithic China. Its villages, at Banpo near Xi'an and Jiangzhai, were planned with a central plaza, houses arranged in rings, and a pottery workshop and burial ground; Banpo's houses were sometimes round and later rectangular, and the dead were buried under the floors of the living. The people farmed millet, kept pigs and dogs, wove cloth on looms and fished with bone hooks and nets. The pottery is the culture's signature: red vessels with black designs of fish, faces, frogs and spirals, often with a human mask that may be a deity or ancestor. Microscopic study of the sherds shows the painters used brushes. Grain storage pits held enough for the year, and the community shows only modest differences in wealth, though later phases suggest growing inequality. The culture's descendants helped shape the Longshan and, in tradition, the earliest Chinese states; its type site was excavated by Johan Gunnar Andersson in 1921. Millet from Banpo was one of the earliest staple crops of northern China, and the village was abandoned and rebuilt repeatedly on the same terrace.