“Neolithic renderings of humans, in drawing or sculpture, can have a powerful effect on modern viewers, by bringing them face to face with fellow human beings from thousands of years ago.”
- Ronald W. Longsdorf, ‘The Pottery Age, An Appreciation of Neolithic Ceramics from China’
The pottery and stone objects unearthed from the Neolithic settlements are all that remain of a world which no longer exists. And yet, these remnants bring us into direct contact with the shapes of the natural world thousands of years ago. By the fifth millennium BCE, artisans had achieved sophistication in pottery which had would take diverse forms signaling the development of specialised functional vessels. Nature and the village environs would present ready inspiration, and vessels would assume these shapes even when they were not demanded by function or ergonomics.
Consider a ‘red’ pottery bottle the pear-shaped body rising to a waisted neck surmounted by a bulbous mouth sculpted to represent a humanoid head. The head does not appear to serve any function, and yet the design is striking. Longsdorf writes: “The bottle is well designed. The shape, both visually and functionally, has a strong and weighty base to counterbalance the long, thin, elegant neck.” (The Pottery Age, An Appreciation of Neolithic Ceramics from China, P.32) It is not difficult to imagine this form as an antecedent evolving in the abstract into later classic shapes such as the double gourd or ‘garlic-head’ gourd.
We find abstract avian forms in what is sometimes called the ‘nesting bird shape’ taking, as the name suggests, the form of a rounded bird body, tapered tail and an offset neck. This shape might also be interpreted as the form of a low boot, as there are some similar vessels that have been sculpted to resemble the human foot or footwear.
A rare painted pottery human-head jar Majiayao culture, Machang phase, c. 2200-2000 B.C.
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Tripod ewers appear in various cultures such as the Dawenkou, Longshan, Qijia and Erlitou, and a comparison of the vessels reveal a progression of the form. The shape is typically composed of a collar and a spout connected to a generously curved body supported on three mammiform legs and formed on one side with a handle joined to the body. The coil-built, hollow legs were a technical innovation which allowed for direct contact over a fire bed with even distribution of heat across a maximal surface area. The significance of this ancient shape is far more than just functional, however, and has endured as a form through later periods of Chinese art history. Within the variations of the tripod shape, examples from the Neolithic period take on notable zoomorphic features. Whereas some scholars suggest that the tripod legs resemble the udders of milch animals, viewed from a different way, the ewer might resemble a wild bird as its beak and outstretched throat assume the form spout and neck, while its two legs and tail form the tripod.
Longsdorf reminds us that Neolithic ceramic forms: “took generations, sometimes centuries, to develop. At any moment in time, the Neolithic potters were doing their best to accurately reproduce the ceramic prototypes of their culture, taught to them by their community, not inventing new ones. But the countless iterations and subconscious alterations which occurred over time, viewed in the foreshortened lens of history inevitably produced innovations.” (‘The Pottery Age, An Appreciation of Neolithic Ceramics from China’, P. 15) The repetition and progression of Neolithic ceramic forms, such as the tripod ewer, would evolve through the dawn of the Bronze Age into what we now understand to be classic forms of archaic ritual bronzes. The Neolithic prototypes were the precursors to the staple shapes that would endure through millennia of Chinese art history.
