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[[underline]] Chapter XVIII. [[/underline]] 389.

northern China, seems to have attained a surprisingly high pitch of excellence.  The finds on that site manifested no little specialization, both in the forms of the vessels themselves and in the purposes for which they seemed to be designed.  While the coarse gray-brown ware retained throughout a certain aspect of crudity, some of the specimens of "painted ware", broken and incomplete though most of them were, betrayed a really considerable degree of merit, in form, in texture, and often in decoration. They compared very favorably, in fact, with pottery made during the Neolithic stage of cultural development anywhere in the world.

[[underline]] Artifacts of Various Materials. [[/underline]]
  In the culture-deposits at Wa Cha Hsieh, implements of worked stone were very numerous, and those of bone only slightly less so.  Those of the former material included axes, adzes, perhaps chisels (the latter hard to distinguish from adzes), knives, discs, both perforated and unperforated (the former perhaps weights for digging-sticks), arrowpoints, and what appeared to be "polishers" for burnishing pottery (see page 387).  Among the objects of bone were awls, hairpins, perforated needles, and again arrow-points.  Comparatively few pieces of worked shell occurred; of these few, four were discoidal in form and well polished; as they lacked perforations, they could not have been spinning-whorls, but may have been counters used in some game.

[[underline]] Mealing-stones. [[/underline]]
    Indicative of the importance of planting at Wa Cha Hsieh in prehistoric times was the abundance of mealing-stones or "mullers" found there---flat, unshaped slabs of basalt, diabase, or even sandstone, rubbed smooth on one side through continual use (pl. 59, fig. 2).  Both among the modern peasantry of the region and in the Neolithic skulls found there, I noted