Study On The Round Pottery Of Neolithic Age In Central Plains

The central plains region,located in the middle reaches of the Yellow River basin,mainly includes the three regions that is the central Shaanxi plain,the southern Shanxi province,the western Henan province,and it is one of the central areas of human civilization development.Round potteries,a special utensil,were widely used in this region in the neolithic age.Round potteries,which refer to a kind of utensils which made use of pottery fragments to trap or grinding,were generally rounded.There are relatively few researches on this kind of utensils,and the researches focus mainly on its functions.Some scholars speculated that they are scrapers,toys and so on.There is no comprehensive study on the round potteries in central plains so far.The paper,by contrastive analysis,will study on the round potteries on the basis of previous studies in central plains in the neolithic age from the aspects of essential attributes such as ceramic,site,shape and spatial and temporal distribution,functions and so on.It is hoped that the future research will be beneficial.This paper is divided into four chapters.The first chapter is the introduction and the chapter summarized the research status of round potteries from three aspects of name,functions and the relationship with the ceramic spinning wheel.In order to determine the time and space scope of this study,the central plains region is defined,and the cultural genealogy of the neolithic age in central region is briefly described.The chapter two and chapter three are main parts of the article.Firstly,making a statistical analysis of the data of neolithic round potteries in central plains published so far,to introduce the round potteries’ situations of the typical sites in three areas from the basic attributes such as the number of sites,the number of round potteries,ceramic,methods of making,shape and site and so on.Secondly,according to the cultural period,the parts summarize and analyse round potteries’ characteristics from different aspectsof three regions respectively,and by contrastive analysis,obtain spatio-temporal distribution characteristics which was going down in wave of round potteries’ development in central plains region.Thirdly,the paper made a summary and analysis for the shape and methods of making’characteristics of round potteries in different periods,to obtained that the production methods of round potteries were changed from mainly trapping in the middle and late neolithic period to mainly grinding in the last neolithic period,and the transformation of the production methods may be related to the change of the function of the round potteries.In the end,on the basis of previous research,the paper,on the basis of previous studies,supplemented with more archaeological findings and combined with the physical data excavated in Guojiazaoyuan site of Jishan county,will prove the possibility of the round potteries as “harvesting tools”,raw materials of pottery spinning wheels,buried tools,vessels’ lid and so on.With the above analysis,reaching conclusions that the round potteries’ function was diverse.Round potteries were an important utensil in the neolithic age,which played an indispensable role.During the Xia,Shang and Zhou periods,people also used round potteries,and their source should be found in the neolithic age.