Duan Shandun Site

Duan Shandun Site

The Duan Shandun Site is a protected cultural heritage site of Jiangsu Province.

The Duan Shandun Site is located southeast of Dinggang Town in Dantu County, on the north bank of the Taiping River, 16 kilometers west of downtown Zhenjiang. It was discovered in 1957, and excavated in 1981 through a joint effort by the Nanjing Museum, Nanjing University, and Xiamen University.

The site is an elongated earthen mound, 7 meters above the surrounding farmland, with a total area of 24,000 square meters. The cultural layer is as thick as 2.5 to 4.5 meters, with multiple strata piled on top of each other. Architectural foundations include rectangular fired-earth surfaces and postholes, alongside which there are nine burial sites—apart from two damaged adult graves, all are children’s burials. This is a site that existed over a long period and supported a certain population and settlement. Many of the artifacts feature characteristics commonly associated with the "Upper Layer of the Hushu Culture"; stone tools mainly consist of adzes, knives, and sickles, as well as axes, halberds, spears, arrowheads, and chisels. There is also a relatively large number of small copper items, along with pottery molds and stone molds for casting copperware, and copper awls and chisels used as tools. Pottery includes a high proportion of red pottery, as well as gray pottery, stoneware, and proto-porcelain. The main forms are sandy red pottery ding (cauldrons), li (tripods), and tripods without decoration, gray clay pottery basins, dou (stemmed bowls), bowls, plates, and jars, red clay pottery jars, basins, and bowls, and stoneware jars, vats, and bottles. Proto-porcelain includes bowls and dishes. The stoneware often features stamped patterns, primarily including grid patterns, thunder patterns, ladder-grid patterns, meander patterns, zigzag lines, and composite imprints. The site dates from the early Western Zhou Dynasty in the Central Plains to the middle of the Warring States Period. It is considered a typical settlement site for research on the Ningzhen region during that time.

Further Reading:

· Third Batch of Protected Cultural Heritage Sites of Jiangsu Province