Yinzhou Shell Mound Site

Yinzhou Shell Mound Site

The Yinzhou Shell Mound Site is a Guangdong Provincial Cultural Heritage Protection Unit.

The Yinzhou site is located on Doubian Hill in Yinzhou Village, Baimi Town, Sanshui City. It dates from the late Neolithic period to the early Bronze Age. The site covers an area of 25,000 square meters. Discovered in 1982, nearly 775 square meters were excavated between 1991 and 1993. The cultural layer is 1.5 meters thick, and parts of the deposit contain large amounts of shells, mainly clams and cockles. Seventy-eight burials, ninety ash pits, and five house foundations were uncovered. The house foundations had foundation trenches around them, with densely arranged postholes at the bottom. The cultural remains are divided into three phases. The first phase included pottery such as cauldrons, jars, bean pots, and tripods. The firing temperature was relatively low, and decorations featured fine diagonal stripes, plain stripes, and coarse-line leaf vein patterns. Tripod vessels appeared only occasionally and were influenced by the Shixia culture. A carbonized long, curved wooden ornament was found above the skull in Burial No. 30. The second phase included pottery such as cauldrons, bean pots, round-bottomed jars, ring-footed jars, vessel stands, and spinning whorls. The main decorative pattern was the curvilinear pattern, along with more than ten other types such as thundercloud patterns, leaf vein patterns, and double-line rectangular grid patterns. Stone tools included long adzes, shouldered or shouldered-and-segmented adzes, chisels, arrowheads, and grinding stones. Burial No. 74 yielded a celadon adze, a ring, stone knives, and a bone armband. The third phase saw the emergence of new pottery types such as concave-bottomed jars, wide-shouldered jars, slender-handled bean pots, plates, large-mouth high-necked zun vessels, and spouted vessels. Decorative patterns included leaf vein patterns, double-line rectangular grid patterns, twin-line grid patterns, grid patterns, and twin-line grid patterns with raised dots. The types of stone tools were the same as in the second phase. Human remains in the burials were well-preserved, all being single inhumations in east-west oriented vertical earthen pits with extended supine burials.

In 1983, the Sanshui County People's Government designated it as a cultural heritage protection unit. On July 17, 2002, it was listed as part of the fourth batch of Guangdong Provincial Cultural Heritage Protection Units.

Further Reading:

· Fourth Batch of Guangdong Provincial Cultural Heritage Protection Units