The recently excavated relics at the local Guangfulin archaeological site indicate that Shanghai may have been a magnet for migrants more than 4,000 years ago.

Many new archaeo-logical evidence unearthed in suburban Song-jiang District may debunk the long-accepted assertion that Shanghai started out as a humble fishing village during the Tang Dynasty (A.D 618-907). The evidence suggests that the region was a magnet for people from other parts of China some 4,000 years ago.

"Artifacts unearthed at the Guangfulin archaeological site date back 4,300 years, and differ from the local culture at the time, but are similar to the contemporaneous cultural relics found in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River. That means the first batch of migrants came to Shanghai over 4,000 years ago," says Song Jian, an archaeologist with the Shanghai Cultural Relics Committee and chief of the Guangfulin excavation.

The Guangfulin site, covering about 1.1 million square meters, is located in southwestern Songjiang District. Excavations led by the Cultural Relics Committee, Fudan University and Nanjing University have uncovered many relics sup-porting the new theory.

"The Guangfulin relics reveal a lost page in the history of Shanghai," says Song.

Guangfulin is a vast meadow-land south of the 99-meter-high Sheshan Hill. This isn't the city's oldest site - that honor belongs to Fuquan Hill in western Shanghai's Qingpu District, whose civilization dates back to the Majiabang Culture (4,000-2,685 B.C.) and Songze Culture (3,900-3,200 B.C.) periods.

Both of these civilizations predate Guangfulin's earliest findings, during the Liangzhu Culture period (3,300-2,200 B.C.), but the Guangfulin findings are no less significant. Some of the relics indicate large-scale human migration, while others indicate the origins of Shanghai as a town.

"Liangzhu Culture was the mainstream culture of the areas in the lower reaches of Yangtze River 4,000 years ago. At Guangfulin, we unearthed a great deal of pottery and jade typical of this period," says Song.

Unlike the Fuquanshan site, which boasted a number of elaborate tombs, with servants and slaves buried alive with their masters, Guangfulin's 27 tombs are small and middle-sized, indicating that the people who lived there 4,000 years ago may not have been of a very high social status. "Thus far the relics we have unearthed from Guangfulin are mainly pottery, unlike Fuquanshan where there was a lot of jade and ivory," says Song.

Archaeologists also found a 3-meter-deep well, with a bamboo cover over the inner wall. "The bamboo cover served to prevent the buckets from knocking the clay off the well wall and consequently polluting the water," says Song. "That says a great deal about how environ-mentally-conscious these prehistoric people were."

Other finds are more puzzling. Pottery with "rope marks" found on-site "certainly didn't belong to the Liangzhu Culture, because this type of design can only be found in the Longshan Culture," Song remarks. "Longshan Culture" is the culture of the tribes along the river in Henan and Hebei provinces between 2,310 and 1,810 B.C., and the existence of their pottery here indicates that they settled in Guangfulin.

"Guangfulin is one of those rare archaeological sites from which we can see the blending of cultures from various regions during China's prehistorical era," says Gao Menghe, an archaeologist at Fudan University.

The next step, says Song, is to use technology like carbon dating to confirm this hypothesis. The hundreds of artifacts that have been unearthed at Guangfulin span the ages, from the Neolithic Age's Liangzhu Culture period to the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Two key periods include the aforementioned Liangzhu and the period from the Spring and Autumn Period (770-467 B.C.) to the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 220). Research on the latter is now under way, with scholars hoping to determine when Shanghai first officially became a town.

Currently, the first established Shanghai town is believed to be Huating Town of Jiajing District in the city's northwest, dating from the Tang Dynasty. But the new findings at Guangfulin may push that date back as early as the Han Dynasty. "Historic literature specifying when Shanghai first became a town is quite nebulous. We are sure that Huating Town must have existed in the Tang Dynasty, but earlier records also mention Huating, which makes the date of its establishment uncertain," says Song.

( China Daily April 22, 2002)