Study Of Stone Artifacts At The Shuiliandong Site

Shuiliandong,located in Pingshan County,Shijiazhuang City,Hebei Province,is an important cave site during the late stage of Late Pleistocene in the eastern area of Taihang Mountain.Through the excavation from May 25 to July 11,2010,more than 200,000 pieces of cultural remains were found in the lower and upper cultural layers of this site,including abundant stone artifacts,animal fossils,burnt bones,bone artifacts and so on.In addition,the fire remains and the pebble remains were also found in this site.The unique and rich cultural characteristics of Shuiliandong Site will provide important materials for researches on human activities during the Upper Paleolithic period in China.In this thesis,I conduct a report and a preliminary research on 96130 stone artifacts from Shuiliandong Site,and then explore behavior modes of ancient humans reflected by lithic industry in Shuiliandong Site.To be more specific,I intend to discuss cultural characteristics and behavior modes of Shuiliandong people which are reflected by stone artifacts by addressing sources of raw materials,lithic assemblage,knapping technology and tool retouching techniques of the 96130 lithic materials through typological study,statistical analysis and chain operation research.The paper reveals general features of lithic industry in Shuiliandong Site in aspects of blanks,and shows longitudinal development of lithic industry in Shuiliandong Site from the perspective of layering research.The research results showed as follows: Firstly,quartz was the main raw material gathered from bedrock of mountains about 5km away from the site and the natural forms was quartzite rock.Only a small part of materials was pebbles from nearby rivers.The quartz rocks were produced systematically and utilized with high consumption rate,but raw material resources were far from being exhausted.Secondly,lithic assemblage consists of cores,flakes,chunks,chips,pebbles and tools.They reflect all aspects of lithic production,from raw material procurement,flaking to tool making and using.The first and second kinds of tools were both found in this site.The retouched tools include scrapers,points,choppers,borers,thumbnail scrapers,denticulates,end scrapers,notches and irregular pieces.The scrapers,made of irregular small flakes and seldom delicately retouched,constitute the dominant tool type.Thirdly,principal method used for knapping was direct hard-hammer percussion while bipolar technique was also used for producing flakes.Fourthly,most of retouched tools were made by flakes and retouched by hand hammers.In general,the mending of tools was conducted in a simple and casual manner,which leds to a small quantity of well-made and delicate tools.The comparison of Shuiliandong Site with correlative Paleolithic Sites in Huabei area reveals that lithic industry of Shuiliandong site,as part of the flake-tools industry in North China,has distinctly indigenous features.Besides analysis of 96130 stone artifacts,this thesis also carries out a study of the species,abundance and residual status of animal fossils to figure out the conditions of environment and resources at that time,through which survival and adaptive behaviors of ancient humans can be observed.The C14 dating reveals that the cultural layer of the Shuiliandong Site belongs to the MIS3 period and is 35,000 to 28,000 years old.