An archeological project is expected to outline the chronology in the prehistoric millennium from 4,500 years ago to 3,500 years ago to decode the origin of Chinese civilization.

The government-backed project, called "Pre-research on the Origin of the Chinese Civilization", was launched in June, 2004, with an aim to work out the chronology of the Yao, Shun, Yu periods and the Xia Dynasty, said Wang Wei, deputy director of the Archaeological Institute under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).

Yao, Shun and Yu are three leaders who have been much praised in historical tradition. In their period disastrous floods occurred and they called on all the tribes to fight against the disasters.

In the next five years, archeologists will study the Yangshao Culture, represented by painted pottery, in Henan Province and the civilization in the late Western Zhou Dynasty (1,100 BC - 771 BC) along the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, Wang said.

The Chinese nation is one of the four ancient nations with the longest civilizations across the world. Though boasting 5,000 years of civilization, the widely-acknowledged beginning of the civilization with historical records could be dated back to the Shang Dynasty (1,600 BC - 1,100 BC) thanks to the discovery of oracle bones.

With the inscriptions on the oracle bones, the earliest characters in China, archaeologists outlined what the society was like in the Shang Dynasty.

But there are still 1,000 years unaccounted for in China's 5,000-year civilization, making it essential for the archeologists to find out what the pre-Shang society was like.

For the project, archeologists designated six major relics sites, including five in relics-rich Henan Province and the other in neighboring Shanxi Province.

The five in Henan included the Neolithic Xipo Site in Lingbao County, Wangchenggang Site in Dengfeng, Xinzhai Site in Xinmi County, Erlitou Site in Yanshi County and Dashigu Site in Zhengzhou. The other was the Taosi Site in Xiangfen, a city in Shanxi.

The six sites were all large-scale towns in prehistoric China, and provided crucial materials for the study of social structures and the emergence of the early states in the mysterious 1,000 years before the Shang Dynasty, Wang said.

(Xinhua News Agency November 26, 2005)