Cishan Cultural Site Museum

Cishan Cultural Site Museum

The Cishan Cultural Site Museum serves as a patriotic education base.

The Cishan Cultural Site Museum is located in Cishan Town, southwest of Wu'an City. The museum covers a construction area of 8,000 square meters and displays over 1,100 unearthed cultural relics. The site protection shelter spans an area of more than 2,800 square meters, recreating the historical scene of the Cishan Culture as it was when first excavated. The building combines ancient and modern architectural features. The main gate follows traditional Chinese architectural design, while the exhibition halls, protective shelters, and office buildings are built with a mixed structure of brick, wood, and cement in an antique style. The stele corridor consists of cement imitation wooden corridors with double-slope gray-tiled hip-and-gable roofs. The protective shelter structure is made of steel with a mining-frame design.

The museum consists of a central lobby and two main exhibition halls on either side, enhanced with modern high-tech audio, lighting, and electrical effects to recreate the living and production scenes of the Cishan people from eight thousand years ago. At both ends of the exhibition halls are dioramas depicting the fishing, hunting, and gathering activities of the Cishan people. The halls feature floor-to-ceiling display cases that sequentially exhibit stone tools, pottery, bone artifacts, agricultural implements, divination culture, and ritual items. On the west side of the courtyard, there is a large exhibition shelter measuring 55 meters by 30 meters, which includes simulated scenes of house foundations, storage pits, ash pits, and “composite objects” among other archaeological remains.

The east hall displays bone artifacts, arrowheads, fishhooks, bone needles, bone shovels, seashells, domestic chicken skulls, pig skulls, dog skulls, macaque skulls... as well as agricultural and breeding specimens such as millet, small-leaved hackberry, and hazelnuts. There are also ancestral-shaped vessels, achillea vessels, and gui trays.

The west hall displays stone tools, pottery, stone grinding plates, stone grinding rods, stone axes, stone shovels, stone sickles, stone hammers, and stone swords. Pottery items include bird-head-shaped pedestal pottery basins, pottery jars, pottery pots, pottery bowls, and three-legged bowls.