The Licorice Mountain Site

The Licorice Mountain Site

The Licorice Mountain Site, located about 2.5 kilometers southwest of Xupu Township in Yizheng City, is an oval-shaped mound site approximately 11 meters above the ground. Discovered in 1961, it was excavated in 1982 by institutions such as the Nanjing Museum and the Yangzhou Museum. The excavation covered an area of 350 square meters. Based on stratigraphic relationships and the characteristics of cultural relics, the site includes remains from four periods: the late Shang Dynasty, the Western Zhou Dynasty, the Spring and Autumn Period, and the late Spring and Autumn to early Warring States Period.

The late Shang Dynasty remains are represented by Pit No. 2, yielding artifacts such as fine cord-marked ding tripods with partitioned legs, wide-rimmed shallow-dish pottery dou stems, and incised-patterned jars.

Artifacts from the Western Zhou and Spring and Autumn periods include semi-solid-foot ding tripods with intermittent cord marks, dou stems, jars, basins, proto-porcelain dou stems, stamped-pattern hard pottery jars, as well as bronze axes, bronze arrowheads, stone sickles, and stone adzes.

Artifacts from the late Spring and Autumn to early Warring States period include jar-shaped vessels with three nipple-like feet at the base, straight-walled cylindrical bowl-shaped vessels, proto-porcelain bowls, bronze arrowheads, scrapers, ant-nose coins, and iron implements.

The Licorice Mountain Site is the first Shang and Zhou site excavated in the Shugang hills north of the Yangtze River. Its early Iron Age cultural remains are relatively rare in the Ningzhen region south of the Yangtze.