The Banpo Museum, on the eastern outskirts of the ciw, 8km from the station, is the first stop on most eastern tours, layout want to arrive independently, take trolleybus #105, which leaves from a terminus on Bei Dajie, 300m north of the Bell Tower, and get off at the second stop after you cross the river - it’s about an hour’s ride. The ticket affords access to both the museum (daily 9am-5.30pm; RMB40) and the model village (same hours), though the latter is a waste of time. The site as a whole gets mixed reviews; it’s not visually spectacular, so some imagination is required to bring it alive.
The Banjo Museum is the excavated site of a Neolithic village, discovered in 1953, which was occupied between around 4500 BC and 3750 BC. It’s the biggest and best-preserved site so far found of Yangshao culture, and is named after the village near the eastern bend of the Yellow River where the first relics of this culture were found. A history written around 300 BC states that the Yangshao people “knew their mothers not fathers. Living together with the deer they tilled the earth and wove cloth and between then-l- selves there, was no strife.” This, and the fact that the women’s graves have more objects in them than the men’s, has led to the Chinese contention that the society was matriarchal, and the somewhat questionable claim that theirs was “a prinfitive communist society”, as tourist literature states. From bone hooks and stone tools unearthed, it is more securely known that they farmed, fished and kept domestic animals.
You can walk around the covered excavation site, a lunar landscape of pits, craters and humps, on raised walkways, but it can be hard to relate these to the buildings and objects described on the signs in whimsical English. The village is divided into three areas; the first is a residential section bounded by a surrounding trench for defence, which includes the remains of 46 houses, round or pyramid-shaped and constructed half underground around a central firepit with walls of wood faced with mud and straw. Around the houses are pits, used for storage, and the remains of pens which would have held domestic animals. A larger, central building was used as a communal hail.
North of here was a burial ground, around which are exhibitions of skeletons and funerary objects, mostly ceramic bowls and jade or bone ornaments. One grave, of a young girl, buried in an earthenware jar, contained 76 objects, including jade earrings and stone balls. Other ceramics found at the site, which were made in six kilns here, are displayed in the museum wing, They are surprisingly sophisticated, made by hand of red clay and decorated with schematic images of fish, deer and heads, or with abstract patterns, sometimes with marks on the rim which appear to be a form of writing. Also in the muse- um you can see barbed fish hooks with weights, stone tools, spindles and bone needles.
A compound of huts outside the museum, the Culture Village is a crude attempt to reconstruct the original village - a Neolithic theme park entered through the nether regions of an enormous fiberglass woman. Little attempt is made at authenticity beyond trying to cover the fire extinguishers with leaves.
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