[MUSIC PLAYING]

PETER K. BOL: So we came down to the viewing room in the Peabody Museum

here at Harvard to take a look at some artifacts and some books.

The theme for today is the origins of civilization and, more specifically,

the stories people tell themselves about the origins of civilization.

Even universities define their origins-- if we go to the Harvard

Yard, you'll see a statue of John Harvard, which

defines Harvard's origins.

And if you go to Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, you'll see a big statue

of Mao Zedong looking east, in some ways, defining an origin for that

style of education, that university as well.

But I'm here with two people who can talk to us about these origin stories.

And the first person I want you to meet is Chris Foster who is a graduate

student here at Harvard working on early China and who's going to bring

in the basis for the first of our stories, which is artifacts.

And this is what archaeologists do.

So why don't you first begin by saying what archaeologists do or how they

create their stories about the origin of civilizations.

CHRIS FOSTER: Sure, definitely.

Well, first, we should begin with a definition of what archaeology is.

And that's the scientific study of the human past

according to material remains.

And to demonstrate this point, I thought I'd bring an object in today

that we could look at together.

PETER K. BOL: OK, great.

CHRIS FOSTER: Archaeology really begins with a simple observation.

And that is that we as humans are constantly interacting with the

material world around us.

The idea with archaeology is that, knowing this, we can start with the

material remains and work backwards and try to reconstruct the behaviors,
the processes, the relationships that we have with these material objects.

So let's begin and take a look at these two pots.

Now, they're from the Neolithic period, from the Yangshao culture.

We have the Neolithic.

We have the Bronze Age.

And we have the Iron Age.

So, generally, when you hear the Neolithic, you think of societies and

cultures that are using stone tools.

So here we have Neolithic pots.

And why don't we think of a few questions that

archaeologists might ask them.

What is the material that these pots are made out of?

Where was that material found?

And how were pots actually made?

These pots, they were likely made from clay that was coiled into rings,

stacked on one another, pinched and smoothed, and then put

in a kiln for firing.

This tells us a lot about the technology of the society that these

pots were made and the limitations to that technology as well.

Let's return to the decorations then, too.

We see here a bunch of geometric shapes, animal motifs.

These are symbols, right?

And we can wonder about the stories that they tell and that they meant to

the people who actually owned these pots.

And for archaeologists, that's a very interesting question because it

relates it identity and how these peoples identified.

And they constructed or even contested their identity vis-a-vis these symbols

on the pots.

What's another question that we might ask of a pot like this?

Well, I think an obvious one would be function, right?

What are these pots used for?

A good guess might be for storage--

food storage, in particular.

And if we had the means to, an archaeologist might want to do a

chemical analysis and see actually what was in this pot at some point.

This tells us a lot about the beginnings of agriculture, the

beginnings of permanent settlements, and specialized labor.

So how would we go about reconstructing what this pot was

actually used for?

Well, an important tool that archaeologists turn to is context--

that is, the context of the find.

Where was this pot found?

And it turns out, pots like this were often found in burials, which might

explain also why the decoration is on the top half of the pot.

Some scholars believe that it was meant to be viewed from above, down

into the tomb.

Now what does this tell us?

Well, we can begin to reconstruct religious rites.

But we can do much more than that, too.

Take a look at this tomb again.

Notice all the pots that are in that burial.

This tells us a lot about wealth and social status in that society,

especially when we compare against other burials which might not have had

anything in them at all.

From there, we can then begin to compare different artifacts and

vis-a-vis one another.

And we can look at them over time and space and notice similarities and

decoration and size and their use and whether or not they're in burials, how

they're positioned in burials.

And from this, we can begin to construct larger groups of people who

identified with one another, who had similar practices in what we as

archaeologists will come to call a culture.

And this allows us, at the very broadest level, to begin to talk about

how cultures are created, how they're formed, how they move, how they change

both internally and externally, and really how civilization began.

PETER K. BOL: Thank you.

CHRIS FOSTER: Thank you.

PETER K. BOL: So one of the things that I'm going to want to argue today

is that the archaeological recovery of China's antiquity, of its pre-history,

of the origins of civilization goes together, in fact in China at least,

with what might be called a very motivated, somewhat ideological

attempt to define the nature of Chinese civilization as well--

something that has great political significance today.

But we'll save that for later.

Now, we've asked a second graduate student to come in.

This is Yu Wen, who works in modern intellectual history.

And she's going to give us a very different source for thinking about

the origins of civilization.