第十次练习-河姆渡遗址2-参考译文

Exhibition Hall Three

Exhibition Hall Three displays the houses and the society of the Hemudu people.

In the Exhibition Hall, there is a collection of some wooden structural components of the “raised houses” and tools for making the components. This picture shows the restored model of a cluster of houses that were made by the Hemudu people 7,000 years ago. The largest building in the picture is a typical raised long house 23 meters in length and 7 meters in width. The foundation of the house consists of four orderly rows of foundation piles driven 0.5 to 1 meter into the ground which support the intersecting grade beams. Over the beams at the point of one meter the wooden floor boards are fixed to the beams with tongues and grooves. The roof truss is made up of the 3-meter-high middle pillars, the 2.6 meter-high back pillars and the front pillars a little lower than the back pillars, all connected with tongues and grooves to the purlins, and other wooden components, and all carved for decoration. The house is roofed with straw mat and covered with rice straw and twitch-grasses. Along the ridge are pottery decorative pieces in shape of animals. Primitive as it is, it is the prototype of the richly ornamented traditional houses of China. In the front is a corridor opening to eight rooms. It is estimated that the house is a typical one for at least seven or eight matriarchal families. The unique house, built by the Hemudu people 7,000 years ago, deserves to be the prototype of Chinese houses, from which the magnificent Chinese buildings of palaces, temples, pavilions and towers have developed.

This photo is of a well. The mouth of the well is built of four logs in form of a square frame. This may be the source of the pictographic Chinese character “井”(a well). It might be claimed that this wooden-mouthed well might be the earliest well in the world.

The findings at the Hemudu Relics include a large number of spinning and weaving tools of many kinds: spinners, shuttles, warp beams, combs, bone knives, and bone needles. This indicates that our ancestors at Hemudu were already able to weave clothes to keep themselves warm instead of covering themselves with leaves and undressed hides like the uncivilized people did.

The large quantity of artworks created by the Hemudu people were made of a wide range of materials of ivory, bone, jade, stone and wood, and had different designs and patterns, all beautifully made with painting, carvings and other imaginative techniques. Of these artworks the most impressive are the personal ornaments (jewelry) and ivory carvings. The bone hair clasp, called “Ji” in Chinese, has beautifully carved designs on it. The existence of the hair clasp indicates that the Hemudu people had a habit of holding their hair instead of hanging it loose like some other primitives. Other personal ornamental objects include jade items, semi-annular jade pendants, jade beads, jade rings, all translucent and sparkling, and when stringed with a thread, they formed brooches and necklaces. Among the delicately made ivory carvings, there is a spoon-shaped artwork 17 centimeter in length and 8 centimeters in width. This ivory ornament, called “Two Birds Carrying the Sun”, has on it five concentric circles in the middle and two birds on both sides. The circles with radiating lines around it represent the sun and the two birds carrying the sun are a pair of phoenix. This artwork indicates that the Hemudu people had some primary knowledge of the heavenly bodies and they might have their totem worship.

On Hemudu Ruin were unearthed some 160 bone flutes. These bone flutes, open on both ends and with 1-6 holes in them, are still playable. The music played with the Hemudu bone flutes—the most ancient wind instrument of the world—aroused great interest in the audience in China and foreign countries.