Recasting the past

"It is highly possible that the Erlitou site was the capital of the Xia Dynasty, according to the research, but there is still a big gap between being 99 percent and 100 percent sure," he says. "The question is still open-ended."

Whether they support the Xia capital status of Erlitou or not, experts from both sides have reached consensus on one point: It is a national hub of early Chinese civilization.

According to Wang Wei, director of the Society of Chinese Archaeology, early-stage civilizations appeared in China about 5,000 years ago along the Yellow, Yangtze and Liaohe rivers, and some of them entered the stage of "early state". The Erlitou site shows the assimilation of elements from different cultures and the rise of the Central China Plain as a "core".

"The ritualistic system of Erlitou Culture radiated to many far-away regions, which also shows a vast influence," Wang says. "That was how our country began to form."

For example, all over today's China, as far as Guangdong province and Hong Kong to the south and Gansu province to the west, archaeologists have unearthed yazhang, a typical jade ritual artifact indicating state power in Erlitou Culture.

"Many local cultures accepted the influence of the central kingdom," Xu Hong says. "The expansion of Erlitou Culture did not rely on military power or violent conquest-it used the soft power of a highly developed society.

"Focusing on studies of human settlements, we now have a comprehensive understanding of ancient society then, which has gone beyond the dispute over which dynasty it belonged to," he adds.