Ceramic traditions of Neolithic cultures of northern and southern China

The Neolithic period marks a salient change in social and economic life of ancient tribes of China. It is mainly in the eastern regions that agriculture and animal husbandry are clearly seen in process of formation as the main producing forms of economy. There is a shift to sedentary lifestyle that contributes to enlargement of early settlements. An increase of the population subsequently leads to improvement of the social structure of the society. Early agricultural cultures located in large river basins facilitated the Ancient Chinese civilization. Vast territories of China and the variety of climatic conditions stimulated the emergence of several regional traditions of pottery-making. The differences between the largest groups, the southern and the northern ones, were caused by special features of the economic systems - the predominance of upland areas in the north and the economy based on the rice cultivation in the south. The Qin Mountain range and the Huai River that flows in the North China Plain were a kind of conventional boundary between these two groups. This investigation observes some of the stages of pottery-making, such as the blending the pottery pastes, the ways of shaping the vessel and some secondary parts of it, also the firing regimes in the northern and southern cultures of Neolithic China, which can help us highlight main features of these regional traditions. In the north, the red clays with high iron content were mostly common. The widely spread yellow clays that were not suitable for the pottery-making due to its low ductility and coarseness. On the territories of modern Gansu and Qinghai provinces the method of using form-models was widely used. At first, in the middle Yellow River regions, the technology of making the vessel from the entire lamp of clay was wide-spread. Later, it was the method of spiral coils. During the middle and the late Neolithic periods in Shandong the technology of pottery spin wheel and reducing firing in conditions of lack of oxygen and excess of carbon monoxide allowed to master the technology of producing particularly thin black ceramics. In the south, white ceramic with a high concentration of magnesium, as well as a high concentration of aluminum, were apparently more common. They were particularly flame retardant during firing. The hard ceramic with a high silicon concentration also appeared in the south. The additional tempers, such as rice grains and particles of shells, were a special feature of the southern cultures and a kind of marker of their economic structure. In the south, the method of construction the vessel by such building elements as patches was also used. The potters reached the high level at thin-walled painted pottery-making. The reducing firing is more common for the south. Cultural contacts contributed the spread of advanced technologies. In the Early Neolithic the differences between northern and southern technologies were more obvious, but lately in the Middle Neolithic the method of coils construction was widely spread al over ancient China and in the late Neolithic the potter's wheel was used both in the north and in the south.