Zuoguo Mountain Site

Zuoguo Mountain Site

Zuoguo Mountain Site is a protected cultural heritage site of Hunan Province.

Zuoguo Mountain Site

The site is situated on Zuoguo Mountain in Group 2 of Nancun Village, Damiaokou Town, Dong’an County, a place rich in historical legacy. In October 2008, the Yuanyuanliang Cultural Relics and Archaeology Research Institute, in collaboration with local departments, carried out an excavation here, covering an area of approximately 1,000 square meters. A complete set of mountain-dwelling relics was cleared, revealing over 100 postholes—traces left from ancient columns used to support houses—along with more than 10 ash pits (including hearths). The arrangement of these postholes indicates that the Shang and Zhou dynasty inhabitants living at the foot of Zuoguo Mountain built their shelters using mountain rocks as walls and erected simple shacks by placing posts in the gaps between the rocks. This provides a reconstructible glimpse into how people in the Shang and Zhou periods constructed their dwellings based on the natural environment of rocky mountains.

Within a naturally formed, several-dozen-meter-long deep gully at the site, a cultural layer up to 3–4 meters thick was discovered, yielding a large number of cultural artifacts. These include stone tools such as stone axes, adzes, and chisels, pottery items such as tripods, jars, ding vessels, gui vessels, and spinning whorls, as well as a small number of bronze spearheads, arrowheads, jade earrings, and jade rings attributed to the Shaohao culture. Based on the substantial amount of animal bone remains excavated, it has been determined that the dominant economic activity was hunting. The discovered stone tools have also revealed a complete stone tool production and processing chain—a first in the history of archaeology in Hunan.

From the current excavation findings, the Zuoguo Mountain Site appears to be a central settlement in the Nanxi River Basin during the Shang and Zhou periods, covering an area of about 20,000 square meters. The unearthed relics not only exhibit cultural traits distinct from those of the central dynasties but also show elements of cultural transmission from the Central Plains, as well as northern cultural diffusion southward and signs of inter-regional interaction. This combination of regional cultural dispersal and aggregation, along with differences and exchanges, offers important material evidence for the process of integration within the Huaxia ethnic community and the formation trajectory of Chinese civilization. Whether it can corroborate the legend of Emperor Shun’s southern tour remains to be further verified.

This site has been submitted for designation as a National Key Cultural Relics Protection Unit.

Further Reading:

· Ninth Batch of Protected Cultural Heritage Sites of Hunan Province