Abstract
The origin of the Chinese wenming civilization 文明 has gradually become a scholastic enquiry since the 1980s. **a Nai 夏鼐 (1985) and Su Bingqi 苏秉琦 (1986) both directed their attention to the broad-ranged Neolithic age almost at the same time.
The section was originally published in Chinese as Han Jianye (2021), “The Peiligang era and the origin of Chinese civilization”, Jianghan Archaeology, 1: 50–55. However, in this section here, the definition of wenming is largely different from the English concept “civilization”. Therefore, a proper translation of the term wenming into English is contingent on the specific context in which the term is used.
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Notes
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The orderly-arranged cemeteries are absent in the **nglongwa culture. The excavated burials are predominately house burials associated with some special religious or ritual ideologies. See Yang, Hu & Liu, Guoxiang (1997), “Inquiry into the custom of house burials in the **nglongwa culture and related questions”, Archaeology (1): 27–36.
- 55.
Li **nwei created the model “Long-Distance Communication Network among the Upper Class in Chinese Prehistoric Society” to account for the social and cultural commonalities sprouting all over China after 3500 BCE. This model could also be applied to explain the spread of customs and knowledge systems during the Peiligang era. See Li, **nwei (2015), “The formation of the long-distance communication network among the upper class in Chinese prehistoric society”, Cultural Relics, 3: 51–58.
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Han, J. (2023). The Peiligang Era and the Origin of Chinese Wenming. In: The Making of the Chinese Civilization. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4213-8_4
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