EA-CHAHAI-001 - archaeological find

Chahai (Xinglongwa culture)

China - Liaoning, Fuxin Mongol Autonomous County; Chahai site, Xinglongwa culture horizon (~8000–7600 BP) - East Asia

Function not recorded Candidate only

At Chahai, an 8,000-year-old village site in Liaoning that holds some of the world's earliest worked nephrite, the commonest jade object is not the celebrated slit earring but a small, thin blade: thirteen tongue-shaped strips of milky white and pale green jade, five to ten centimetres long, ground to a slender lens and pierced through one end by a small pecked hole. Chinese archaeology calls them bi-shaped objects — 匕形器, after the ancient eating spoon — and reads them as pendants or dress ornaments, since they lie at the neck, chest, and waist of the dead, in one house burial as three matched pairs of descending size. But their outline is precisely that of a bullroarer: an elongated thin blade hung from a single hole at one end, the same form that led researchers to spin replicas of South African bone 'pendants' and hear them hum at 52–250 Hz. Nothing about the size forbids it — bullroarer slats sound at 4 millimetres thick, and a 6.4-centimetre slate whirler from Stone Age Norway is accepted as the type's smallest member. And these blades were not made in a silent world: bone flutes are reported from the same culture's sites, and its excavators expect drums beside them. No scholar has yet asked the question of Chahai's little blades.

多出自墓主人的颈部、胸部或腹部，应是墓主人佩戴的项饰或衣服上的缀饰

Most come from the neck, chest, or abdomen of the tomb occupants — they should be necklaces worn by the dead or ornaments sewn to their clothing.

Excavation-report summary of the Chahai jade bi-shaped objects, Economic Observer, 1 December 2023

Object

Thirteen thin nephrite blades from the Chahai settlement — the site's most numerous jade type (13 of 44 jade objects). Elongated tongue-shaped strips with a rounded tip, one face slightly concave and the other convex, ground to a slender lens section and pierced near one end by a single biconically pecked hole; milky white to light green tremolite-actinolite nephrite. The class runs about 5–10 cm long (最长者长度可达10厘米，而最短者长度只有5厘米左右; published pieces include a Chahai example at 5 × 3.1 cm and a Xinglongwa-area example at 6.5 × 1.2 cm); thickness is unpublished, but profile photographs and report line drawings show slender lens sections a few millimetres thick. Six lay in a single child's dwelling burial (F7M) at the neck, waist, and feet; House 7's burial held three graded pairs (large, medium, small). Curated by the Liaoning Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology. Date: Chahai settlement, ~8200–7600 cal BP; Bayesian modelling places it among the earlier Xinglongwa villages.

Function

Catalogued as pendants or garment ornaments.

Map confidence

low - Chahai site anchor, near Chahai village, Shala Town, Fuxin Mongol Autonomous County, Liaoning; published locations are village-level.

Source location

EEO 2023 report summary; 赤峰学院学报 2014(1); Tohoku Univ. Museum Bulletin 5

View source Open this point on the interactive map