Tomb No.22 in Area Ⅱ of the Taosi walled-town, Xiangfen, Shanxi, was excavated in 2002. The tomb is 5m long, 3.65m wide and 7m deep. It is dated to the middle Taosi period (2100-2000BC), Although it was destroyed in the late Taosi period, 72 funeral objects remain in the tomb pit and coves, including eight painted pottery vessels, 18 jades, 25 lacquered articles, eight groups of bone arrowheads, two baskets, ten pigs'skeletons, and one huge boar mandible. The discovery of this rich tomb helps us to understand the nature of the walled-town of the middle Taosi period.
In 1999-2000,a settlement of the late Taosi culture was excavated on the Taosi site. It consists of nine semi-subterranean houses and a rammed-wall surface one. They are arranged roughly along a circle, each measuring 7.7-16.7 sq m and belonging to a pairing family. The other vestiges discovered include 15 ash-pits and a tomb. The ash-pit belong to the early, middle and late Taosi culture respectively. Among the unearthed objects are numbers of pottery, bone and stone artifacts, which enriched our knowledge of the culture, especially its middle stage. An analysis of the three phases of pottery further reveals the continued development of the whole culture.
This paper divides the bird script, an ancient form of Chinese written characters into six types and discusses its forms and evolution based on the characters and the archaeological information.
