The Cishan Site

The Cishan Site

The Cishan Site is a National Key Cultural Relics Protection Unit.

The Cishan Site is distributed on a terrace on the north bank of the Luo River, southwest of the county seat of Wu'an City, Hebei Province.

This site is a famous early Neolithic site in North China. Discovered in 1973, it predates the Yangshao Culture, dating back to around 5400–5100 BCE. The cultural deposits at the site are extremely abundant and feature distinct regional characteristics, making it of key significance in exploring the origins of the Yangshao Culture and tracing even earlier Neolithic cultural remains. Due to the site’s typicality, the culture type discovered here was named “Cishan Culture.” To date, over ten sites belonging to the Cishan Culture have been found across central and southern Hebei, from Wu'an to Rongcheng.

Agriculture was the primary mode of production at the time. Two house foundations were discovered at the site, both semi-subterranean structures. More than 460 storage pits were unearthed around the foundations, with carbonized millet found in 80 of them—some deposits were over two meters thick. Production tools such as stone axes, stone knives, stone sickles, stone spades, and stone grinding plates used for processing grain were widely used at the site. People at that time had already learned to domesticate poultry and livestock such as chickens, pigs, and dogs. In addition, fishing, hunting, and gathering remained economically important activities.

Pottery making was one of the defining features of the Cishan Culture. The pottery was made using the coil-building and hand-molding techniques, resulting in somewhat irregular shapes. Sandy red pottery was more common, with vessel types mainly including cups, bowls, plates, basins, tripods, double-handled jars, jars, and dou (bean-shaped vessels)—all everyday utensils. The surfaces of the pottery were decorated with cord marks, grid patterns, comb-stamped patterns, and nipple-like protrusions. The craftsmanship was relatively crude, far inferior to the wheel-made pottery of the Yangshao Culture. (National Cultural Heritage Administration)

Further Reading:

· Second Batch of Hebei Provincial Cultural Relics Protection Units

· Third Batch of National Key Cultural Relics Protection Units