Banpo: Life and Legacy of a Neolithic Village in the Wei River Valley

China's textbooks know exactly what Banpo was: a peaceful, matriarchal clan of millet farmers standing at the dawn of Chinese civilization. The site itself tells a stranger, less tidy story. More than six thousand years ago, a farming community on the Wei River terrace near modern Xi'an built round houses around a large central building, dug a wide ditch to enclose their homes, fired painted potte...