The Longshan Culture City Site at Jingyanggang

The Longshan Culture City Site at Jingyanggang

The Longshan Culture City Site at Jingyanggang is a National Key Cultural Relics Protection Unit.

The Longshan Culture City Site at Jingyanggang is located to the west of Jingyanggang Village. In 1973, Wu Ruzuo from the Institute of Archaeology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences was the first to discover the Jingyanggang site here. In 1979, cultural relics workers from the Liaocheng region conducted selective trial excavations at the site. To the north of the site, one Longshan Culture ash pit and one Spring and Autumn tomb were cleared. The ash pit section shows clear cultural layers, with a deposit thickness of about 1.5 meters. The upper layer is cultivated soil, appearing grayish-brown, scattered with pottery shards and animal bones; beneath the cultivated soil layer are the Han Dynasty and Shang-Zhou cultural layers; the lowest layer is the Longshan Culture accumulation. A large number of artifacts from the middle to late Longshan Culture were unearthed, mostly daily utensils. At the bottom of the ash pit, a complete cattle skeleton was found, likely used as a ritual offering, which is of significant importance for the study of the origins, domestication, and sacrificial use of ancient livestock. Additionally, small bone needles, clam knives, stone knives, and stone axes were collected. The Spring and Autumn tomb is a rectangular vertical earthen pit tomb, measuring 3.5 meters in east-west length, 2 meters in north-south width, and a remaining depth of 3.2 meters. At the center of the tomb bottom is a rectangular waist pit containing a buried dog facing east. The tomb yielded over 1,770 artifacts including pottery, bronze, and bone objects. In 1994, during the development and construction of the Jingyanggang Park in Yanggu County, a cultural relics exploration team organized by the Liaocheng Regional Cultural Relics Management Committee discovered another Longshan Culture city site. The city site has an approximately oval plan, oriented from northeast to southwest, narrower at the western end, with a curved protrusion in the middle. It is about 1,150 meters long from north to south, approximately 230 meters wide at the northern end, about 330 meters wide at the southern end, and roughly 400 meters wide at the widest part in the middle, covering a total area of about 350,000 square meters. From the end of the same year to the winter of 1996, the Shandong Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and the Liaocheng Regional Cultural Relics Management Committee jointly conducted drilling and trial excavation work on the site, with an excavation area of 1,200 square meters. The excavation revealed that no surface city wall remains could be seen, but the underground city walls were well preserved. Currently, a north-south water channel crosses the northeastern corner of the ancient city site. From the western wall of the channel, it can be seen that beneath the cultivated soil lies the remnant base of the Yueshi Culture city wall, which is overlain by the remnant base of the Eastern Zhou city wall. Beneath the Yueshi Culture remnant wall lies the Longshan Culture city wall, with its top about 1 meter above the bottom of the channel. The channel bottom contains water, making further drilling impossible, but it is estimated that there may be several additional layers of city walls below the channel bottom. On the inner side of the Longshan city wall exposed on the channel wall, the rammed layers incline inward, are relatively thick, and irregular, while the outer wall is steep and straight, cutting through the inner ash pits, characteristic of the middle to late Longshan Culture. At the center of the site, there are two platforms—large and small—that utilize and partially modify the original natural hills. Both the large and small platforms have upper and lower layers; the lower layer is mainly rammed with pure yellow-brown sandy soil, while the upper layer is made of grayish soil. The ramming tools include round wooden pestles and stone implements, with clear ramming marks and distinct surfaces. The unearthed artifacts exhibit distinct local characteristics. Among the pottery, gray pottery dominates, black pottery is less common, and red-brown pottery accounts for a certain proportion. In addition to pottery, artifacts such as urns, tripods, li cooking vessels, and basins were also found. Especially noteworthy is a carved pottery shard discovered in a gray ditch excavated in the spring of 1996. It came from the shoulder of a small polished black pottery jar made of clay, with the surviving part being triangular. The carving appears to have been done after the pottery was formed but before firing, likely created by people of the Longshan era. The form of the characters shows possible connections with oracle bone script. The Longshan Culture ancient city site at Jingyanggang is the largest Longshan Culture-era city site discovered so far in the Yellow River basin. The layout of the large and small platforms within the city is clear, and the abundant artifacts provide new clues for studying the features of the Longshan Culture in this region, its relationship with the Central Plains Longshan Culture, and even the origins of ancient Chinese civilization.

The site was designated as a Provincial Key Cultural Relics Protection Unit by the Shandong Provincial People's Government in December 1977, awarded the First Nomination Prize for “China’s Top Ten Archaeological New Discoveries” in 1995, and approved as a National Key Cultural Relics Protection Unit by the State Council in June 2001.