Analysis Of Lithic Artifacts From Zoumaling Site In Shishou,Hubei Province

The site of Shishou Zoumaling in Hubei is a representative city site of the early Qujialing culture in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River.Current research has covered the distribution range of the city walls,the functional partitioning within the site,the chronological staging of the remains,the mode of livelihood reflected by the plant remains,and the production of handicrafts at the household scale.However,it has not been seen to obtain more information about human production and life from the perspective of stone tools.This paper intends to take the stone artifacts harvested since the 2014 archaeological work for the conservation of the Great Site at the Zoumaling site as the object of study,and through the classification and raw material tracing of the stone artifacts from the site,we attempt to understand the production logic of the stone tool industry at the Zoumaling site and lay the foundation for the reconstruction of the vivid picture of the production life of the ancestors of Zoumaling.The results of the study on the classification of lithic artifacts show that the main types of stone tools at the site include stone axes,stone adzes,stone chisels,grinding stones,stone battle-axes,and stone arrowheads,stone flakes,etc.The material identification reveals that the stone products of the site are made of various materials.The ancestors of the site used 14 kinds of stones,including metamorphic sandstone,coarse sandstone,siltstone,black slate,green slate,tuff,siliceous rock,quartzite,gabbro,obsidian,and mudstone,to make stone tools,but the quantity is mainly sandstone and slate,accounting for 85% of the total,while the rest of the lithics account for only 15%.The raw material traceability suggests that the raw materials of stone products at the Zoumaling site mainly originated from the area of Taohua mountain.In terms of the characteristics of the lithic industry at the Zoumaling site,we believe that the ancestors of Zoumaling specialized in the production of stone tools by selecting stones of different lithologies.For example,the metamorphic sandstone was mainly used as a grinding stone,including ordinary and grooved grinding stones,showing the advantage of sandstone in undertaking grinding work,and such tools were probably used mainly for processing stone or bone tools.Quartz is the main component of the grinding stones,which is hard and not easily weathered,making it ideal for grinding activities.Most of the grinding stones at the site have clear grooved depressions on the grinding surface,which should be traces of longterm use.Slate,on the other hand,was mostly used for making stone arrowheads,stone knives and,stone battle-axes with thinner bodies,making good use of the plasticity of its slab-like structure.This biased selection shows that the ancient people knew the physical properties of rock resources quite well and knew how to find and select suitable stone materials to meet the needs of stone tool making and other production and living.In addition the,raw material types of the site mainly include gravel and nodular stone blocks.And they correspond to the stable operation chain of the related ware types respectively.The integrated analysis of the stone tool industry at the Zoumaling site in this paper lays the foundation for further exploring the commonalities and differences between the stone tool industries of prehistoric cultures in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River.Some of the conclusions are limited by the research effort and are left to be tested in more future studies related to the Zoumaling site.