Ancient China considered

This article in the Washington Post is rather interesting:

It’s a golden age for Chinese archaeology — and the West is ignoring it

It also gives a (very short) summary of ancient Chinese civilisations, including this (my bold):

The dominant narrative has presented the origins of Chinese civilization as rooted in a singular source — what is known as the Three Dynasties (the Xia, Shang and Zhou), situated in the Central Plains of the Yellow River valley in contemporary Henan Province, Shaanxi Province and surrounding areas. These dynasties lasted from roughly 2,000 B.C. to the unification of China, in 221 B.C.

In the late 1920s, Chinese archaeologists began to unearth what turned out to be the last capital of the Shang Dynasty (dating to circa 1250 to 1050 B.C.) near Anyang, in Henan province, right in the heart of the Central Plains. These excavations revealed a city with a large population fed by millet agriculture and domesticated animals; there were palace foundations, massive royal tombs, evidence of large-scale human sacrifice and perhaps most importantly, cattle and turtle bones used in divination rituals and inscribed with the earliest Chinese texts. The sophistication of the society that was revealed in these digs helped to solidify belief that there was a single main source of subsequent Chinese culture: This was its epicenter.

As I have said before, what was it with civilisations at that time and sacrifice (especially human sacrifice)?   

Anyway, the current excitement the article talks about is about further archaeological finds from a completely different site:

But finds at Sanxingdui and other sites since the 1980s have upended this monolithic notion of Chinese cultural development. The Sanxingdui discoveries, which are contemporary with the Shang remains, are located in Sichuan, hundreds of miles southwest of the Central Plains, and separated from them by the Qinling Mountain Range. The site is similarly spectacular. At Sanxingdui, we see monumental bronzes, palace foundations and remnants of public works like city walls — as well as the recently discovered, ivory, anthropomorphic bronze sculptures and other objects. Crafts reveal extensive use of gold, which is not much used in the Central Plains, and the agriculture is different too: Rice, not millet, was the foundation of the cuisine. In short, it seems clear that Chinese civilization did not simply emerge from the Central Plains and grow to subsume and assimilate the cultures of surrounding regions.  Instead, it is the result of a process whereby various traditions, people, languages, cultures and ethnicities have been woven together in a tapestry that is historically complex and multifaceted.

I suspected that CGTN would have coverage of the Sanxingdui site, and it does.   This travel show from a couple of years ago shows that it has a pretty flash museum which looks well worth visiting:

  

As the very first comment on Youtube says, the artefacts look rather Mayan-ish.  Or at least, one of the Mesoamerican cultures?    (The large scale human sacrifice is another similarity, of course.)

So yeah, I agree with the guy who wrote the WAPO article - Chinese archaeology is remarkable.