A skeleton and potteries buried with the dead are seen at a restored pit of the Liuwan tombs at the Liuwan Museum of Ancient Painted Pottery on June 10, 2005 in Ledu County of Qinghai Province, China. The museum, built on the ruins of the Liuwan tombs, is China's largest painted pottery museum with a collection of 37,925 antique pieces dating back some 3,000 to 4,600 years ago. Archeologists have unearthed more than 30,000 items of cultural heritage, including over 20,000 pieces of painted pottery, since the 1970s from the site. The Liuwan tombs, a large burial ground for members of a primitive clan, offers valuable materials representing four typical cultures in ancient China for archeologists to study ancient social structure.
Liuwan is a large Neolithic cemetery, found near Liuwan village of Qinghai province in the late 1970s. About 1500 tombs have been excavated there to date, with some 30,000 artifacts. Among the artifacts are distinctive Majaiyao Culture pots (3300-2025 BC). Three sections of the cemetery date between 2650 and 2000 BC.
Sources and Further Information
Lawler, Andrew. 2009. Beyond the Yellow River: How China Became China. Science 325:930-943.
Yang, Xiaoneng. 2004. Chinese Archaeology in the Twentieth Century: New Perspectives on China's Past. Yale University Press, New Haven.
