Viewing page 467 of 469

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

[[underlined]] Chapter XIX.                             419.
[[underlined]] Discussion of the 
      Shih Hsiang Culture.

    The Shih Hsiang culture appeared, from the little that we found of [[strikethrough]] xxx it, to be clearly a composite one. As we have noted, it was characterized not by implements of worked stone but rather by a shell-and-bone industry. There seemed however to be definite even though faint traces of the presence of two quite distinct elements. 
    Of these, perhaps the basic one was a variety of that semi-sedentary planting culture found all over northern China in late prehistoric times and marked by the familiar coarse grayish-brown pottery and the perforated stone knife (here represented by one of shell). [[strikethrough: see pp. 411 and 415 cg.).]] But in association with this, perhaps superimposed upon it from abroad, was another, of a widely divergent type; for this had a quite different sort of pottery, domestic animals (viz., sheep or goats) hitherto unknown in prehistoric China, and a rudimentary acquaintance with metal.
   The very slight indications that we have---based however on a number of clues---all agree in pointing to a period somewhere around the close of the 3rd millennium B.C. or possibly a trifle later, as the most probably date for the existence of the Shih Hsiang culture. In it, perhaps, we have a very early instance of a phenomenon of constant recurrence in the Old World, nowhere more so than in eastern Asia---that of imposition from without of a predominantly pastoral culture on one of another type, less warlike and aggressive and with a semi-sedentary agricultural economy.

[[underlined]] The Chiangs.
     Before we leave the subject of the Shih Hsiang site and its newly re-