Banpo museum: a collection of prehistoric culture

In 1952, the Banpo archaeology site was discovered in a village in Shaanxi. The discovery of the Neolithic settlements were carbon dated to 5,600-6,700 years ago. The site belonged to the Yangshao culture, who lived in the middle reaches of the Yellow River in the New Stone Age.

The Banpo Museum was built at the archaeological site and was the first museum in China to especially focus on a collection of prehistoric cultural relics.

Among the 30,000 pieces in the museum were three types of representative relics: basins decorated with human faces and fish or just fish, and jars shaped like ancient amphoras, with pointed bases.

The basin was used by Banpo ancestors to cover the jar that they used as a “coffin” for their dead children. Each basin has many holes on it. Banpo people believed that the soul of dead child could come out from that small holes and go on living with the alive. The patterns with two human faces and two fish were symmetrically painted on the inside of the basins. The human faces were painted in a style that placed two large fish in their mouths and two little ones in their ears.

The meaning of the mysterious pattern has intrigued visitors since 1955 when the basins were discovered. There are more than 20 hypothetical explanations about the pattern, yet none is confirmed. Some even connect the pattern with the extraterrestrials.

A series of jars with pointed bottoms were discovered at Banpo. The average height is 50 cm, but some are smaller at 30-40 cm. Each has ring-shaped handles. At first these were thought to be water jars that would fill naturally when put into a pool or river. Later experiments showed that wasn’t true and found that the jars were unable to do so, and that they fell over when full of water and lifted up by a rope put through the handles. The jars’ function remains unknown.