Tiger Claw Mountain Site

Tiger Claw Mountain Site

The Tiger Claw Mountain Site is a Major National Historical and Cultural Site.

Era: Stone Age

The Tiger Claw Mountain Site, located in Jinshi City, Changde, Hunan Province, is an ancient site from the Paleolithic era. In May 2013, it was designated and announced by the State Council as part of the seventh batch of Major National Historical and Cultural Sites.

The Tiger Claw Mountain Site covers an area of 10,000 square meters. Stone artifacts were found in the Quaternary reticulated red clay layer approximately two meters below the surface. A survey in 1988 led to an excavation of 60 square meters in May of the same year, yielding seven stone artifacts. From 1994 to early 1997, during soil extraction at a brick factory, an additional 126 stone artifacts and raw materials were collected. The stone artifacts fall into three main categories: cores, flakes, and spheroids. Stone tools include flake tools and pebble tools, with forms such as choppers, cutters, scrapers, points, cleavers, spheroids, and stone hammers.

Overall, this site belongs to the South China pebble tool cultural tradition. It is referred to as the “Lishui Cultural Cluster” due to a distinctive group of pebble choppers—pebble points—and its certain regional characteristics. The Paleolithic artifacts from the Tiger Claw Mountain Site were unearthed from the reticulated red clay of the third and fourth terraces on the right bank of the Lishui River. The geological age is considered to be the early to middle Middle Pleistocene, and the cultural age corresponds to the late stage of the early Paleolithic era. This is the earliest Paleolithic site discovered in Hunan Province.

Further Reading:

· Seventh Batch of Major National Historical and Cultural Sites