Qijia Culture – Its Disappearance Remains An Ancient Mystery

Ellen Lloyd – AncientPages.com – The ancient Qijia culture remains a historical and archaeological puzzle. Its mysterious and sudden disappearance leaves us with many unanswered questions. What happened to these ancient people? Evidence of a mysterious prehistoric disaster has been uncovered at an amazing archaeological dig in the upper reaches of the Yellow River.

Discovery of the Qijia culture

Evidence of the culture was first unearthed in the small village of Qijiaping, in the northwestern Chinese province of Gansu, in the early 1920s by the Swedish geologist Johan Gunnar Andersson.

Around the mid-20th and early 21st centuries, more ancient sites were discovered suggesting that the Qijia culture existed from about 2250 B.C to 1900 B.C.and it is the only Neolithic culture to be uncovered in China that shows the northern Eurasian influence.

Little is known about the Qijia culture, but excavations revealed that these people lived in large villages in terraces along the Huang He (Yellow River) and buried their dead in pits. Their most common implements were stone axes and rectangular knives, although small copperware items.

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