The Benbennao Neolithic Site

The Benbennao Neolithic Site

The Benbennao Neolithic Site is a cultural heritage protection unit of Hebei Province.

The Benbennao Site is located 300 meters west of Benbennao Village in Daqinggou Town, Shangyi County, covering an area of nearly 1,500 square meters. It is the earliest known microlithic site from the Neolithic Age in western Beijing. In the late Qing Dynasty and early Republican period, French priest Father Emile Licent and others conducted investigations here and collected many microlithic specimens, which are still preserved in the Tianjin Natural History Museum. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the first investigation of Benbennao was carried out in 1956, during which many pottery pieces and stone tools were discovered. Among them, the pottery included hand-made reddish-brown pottery, low-fired urns and jars decorated with coarse and fine cord patterns; the stone tools included numerous stone grinding rods and grinding plates associated with microlithic technology.

In 1985, the Shangyi County Cultural Relics Survey Team conducted another investigation and found that the ground of the site was scattered with a considerable number of relics, mostly stone artifacts, followed by pottery, as well as fragments of bronze and iron objects. There were mainly relics from two periods: one was from the Yangshao Culture period, characterized by painted pottery, red-clay pottery mixed with other materials, and sandy red pottery, with identifiable shapes such as pottery basins and jars. The other was gray pottery from the Khitan culture of the northern Liao Dynasty. Stone artifacts included chipped stone tools, polished stone tools, and microlithic tools. Among the chipped stone tools were many flakes, cores, discoid tools, and axe-like chopping tools; polished stone tools were relatively rare; microlithic tools were abundant and varied in type, exhibiting exquisite craftsmanship, including conical cores of different sizes, tanged cores, flat cores, flakes, blades, borers, awls, scrapers, and fingernail-shaped scrapers.

The Benbennao Site is a rare cultural relic site for studying the history of the microlithic age in northern China.

Further Reading:

· Third Batch of Cultural Heritage Protection Units of Hebei Province