BASE-TO-RIDGE POST STRUCTURES IN THE YANGSHAO CULTURE

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to identify the characteristics of the origin of the earliest wooden structures in China: specifically, we worked to identify the process of development of architectural technology in the Yellow River basin of northern China from cave dwellings to structures with a wooden pillar and then to wooden structures. For this objective, we investigated the research materials from the excavation of structures in China from the Neolithic Age, focusing on the Yellow River basin of northern China. The main target of our research was pit dwellings with wooden pillars, semi-pit dwellings and ground-level dwellings in the earliest stage. As a matter of chronological order, the most primitive type of wooden structure developed into ground-level dwellings in the earliest stage in the Yellow River basin and further progressed to dwellings with post-and-lintel construction built on the base. We found that central pillars had appeared in the base-to-ridge post style among semi-pit dwellings, which had developed from the pit dwellings with wooden pillars, and among the earliest ground-level dwellings. Earlier, in the case of cave dwellings with wooden pillars, one of the pillars added to the dwellings was built on the ground of the cave, reaching the top of the structure. Hence, we confirmed that in those cave dwellings with wooden pillars, there was no division between the supporting pillar and the superstructure. Cave dwellings with that type of wooden pillar running from the ground to the top had the base-to-ridge post structure in the sense that the support pillar and the superstructure were not separate. We concluded that the base-to-ridge post structure was already present as early as the time wooden pillars were added to cave dwellings.