Grinding Groove Style Pottery

The Mogou Site, located upstream of the Tao River in Lin Tan County of Gansu Province, is a new important prehistory site that has been excavated in recent years. It is also in the only case with pit-andcave tombs as the main style of Qijia Culture's cemetery in the Gansu and Qinghai Area. Excavators found a set of pottery with the colour of black and gray,part of which was found coexisted with Qijia Culture, their disposition, color, and shape are all clearly different from those of the Qijia, and similar with the Siwa Culture. This phenomenon attracted the excavator's attention right away, but no professionals continued such research on this issue. This essay names this set of pottery as "Mogou Styled Pottery", trying to differentiate between the pottery of Qijia and the Siwa Culture. Through the research of the Mogou style pottery composition and transition, along with the comparison with the relationship between the potteries of these three cultures, it is possible that the Mogou styled pottery is not necessarily a typical style that transitioned from the Qijia culture, but rather a new style that developed in the late period of Qijia Culture. Such development was so strong that it replaced the Qijia styled pottery, which in turn developed into the Siwa style pottery. Based on the analysis of the graves that contained the three different styles of pottery, in general the burial customs did not change despite the difference in funerary pottery. In other words, the burial customs of the people continued to develop. This essay believes that the development of Qijia culture into the Siwa is evidenced by total replacement of the pottery shape; while the people did not necessarily change, the Siwa was the real descendants of the Qijia. The changes of pottery do not necessarily imply that there is a change in archaeological culture nor can it explain the changes of the people.