From June to September this year, after a three-year suspension due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese archaeologists nevertheless returned to Romania to conduct a second excavation at the site of the Dobrovat ruins in the northeast of the European country.
Thanks to this program in Romania, in 2019, Chinese archaeologists had the privilege of setting foot on European soil to conduct systematic studies for the first time.
The Cucuteni culture, an important archaeological era that emerged in the Neolithic past in southeastern Europe, had great diversity from the Carpathian Mountains in the west to the left bank of the Dnieper in Ukraine, covering more than 350,000 square kilometers. The Ukrainian component is known as the Trypillia culture. So far, more than 3,000 sites belonging to the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture have been discovered.
During this year’s fieldwork, the joint Sino-Romanian archaeological team excavated and cleaned up the collapsed burnt red clay deposits of houses 3, 5 and 6 over the ruins of the settlement.
This revealed architectural remains and well-preserved artifacts, adding painted pottery sherds showing designs typical of the early Cucuteni era (c. 4300-4200 B. C. ), such as musical notes and spirals painted white.
Throughout the 3 months of excavations, we were able to better perceive the formation processes and technological characteristics of the so-called “red terracotta house”, one of the most remarkable cultural attributes of the Cucuteni culture, but still the abundance of exquisitely painted objects. ceramics.
Currently, the team has not found any sections of the roofs of the red terracotta houses. Therefore, archaeologists tentatively surmise that the tops of those houses were built with biological tissues without a layer of dust or straw. These peaks were in danger of being temporarily burned by fires, leaving no trace.
According to the existing effects of the excavations, the houses in the village of Dobrovat are arranged in rows, with 8 to 10 meters of loose area between the adjacent houses. These regions contain a small amount of ash, damaged pottery fragments, and animal bone fragments. Some pottery fragments compressed through blocks of burnt red clay have distinctive honeycomb-like molten features, while some stone or rock equipment shows transparent thermal fracture marks, indicating the intensity of internal house fires.
A puzzling phenomenon, however, is the absence of giant lumps of coal in the deposits of baked red clay houses, and the reasons for this need to be explored.
In 1921, Swedish geologist Johan Gunnar Andersson made groundbreaking archaeological discoveries in Yangshao village in Henan province, marking the birth of modern scientific archaeology in China. However, due to the almost blank state of prehistoric archaeological discoveries in China at the time, Andersson created a controversial hypothesis of the “westward spread of painted pottery” due to Yangshao culture displaying strikingly similar painted pottery patterns to those found in southeastern Europe.
Speculation ceased after the advance of archaeology.
However, similarities in painted pottery motifs between the Yangshao culture and the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture remain evident, raising intriguing questions about whether those similarities are a cultural connection or imply one.
So far, in Romania no direct evidence of the East-West cultural exchange has been found in the remains of the Cucuteni culture period. However, during this year’s excavation, we made the first substantial discovery of the East-West cultural exchange in the remains of a later period.
By cleaning the upper deposits of the red-fired clay houses, we discovered features similar to wells dug directly into the red-fired clay deposits. These elements date from a later time than red terracotta houses. Some pits produced finely incised pottery shards dipped in sand, and one ash pit even produced an entire single-handled cup with elaborately incised designs. Based on comparisons with similar knowledge discovered in the neighboring Republic of Moldova, archaeologists say those pits are most likely relics left by Iron Age peoples between 1,500 and 1,000 B. C.
We collected and floated soil samples from these pits. Excitingly, in addition to common local cereal seeds, many pits contained charred millet grains. This marks the first time Chinese archaeologists have discovered early millet crop remains in the European region.
As one of the main local and domesticated crops in China, millet (especially Scottish millet) has biological characteristics such as a short growth cycle, blood resistance, and drought tolerance.
It favored cell populations living in ecologically marginal areas. In the mid to late second millennium BC, as the climate of the northern Eurasian continent became arid, the first groups of pastoralists gradually adopted a nomadic lifestyle.
The seasonal migrations and interactions between different groups along the east-west axis formed a “prehistoric Silk Road “more than 1,000 years before the historical Silk Road. Along this route, the Chinese-originated millet was intentionally chosen for cultivation and dissemination, passing through Central and West Asia before reaching Europe.
In the 1950s and 1960s, European researchers discovered suspicious remains of millet and other cereals at some prehistoric sites. However, many of them were indirect tests due to the limited technological situations of the time.
Soon after, the floated millet grains were sent to the Beta lab in the United States for dating. One of the millet samples even dates back to the early 15th century B. C. It is interesting to note that several samples date from periods ranging from the early Iron Age to the medieval period. These tiny grains of millet are the true testimony of the ancient agricultural cultural exchanges between East and West throughout the Eurasian continent.
Wen Chenghao is an assistant at the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.