New materials from Salawusu sites of North China: paleoliths of 1980 excavation at Fanjiangouwan
HUANG Wei-wen; HOU Ya-mei
2003, 22(04):
309-320.
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The Salawusu valley is located at the southeastern extremity of the Ordos Plateau in Inner Mongolia, North China. It has been known as one of the key Paleolithic sites in northeastern Asia since 1923 when French paleontologists Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Emile Licent found stone and bone artifacts, remains of fire use as well as abundant mammalian fossils from the fluvialacustrine de- posits of the Upper Pleistocene at Yangsigouwan. Stone artifacts from the 1980 excavation at another locality, Fanjiagouwan, are described in the present paper including cores, flakes, retouch flakes (de- bris) and tools, totaling 192 pieces as well as 10 pieces collected during 1978 —1979. The other as- sociated materials like bone artifacts, fragments of mammals, remains of fire use, and the issue of dat- ing for the sites will be reported by other chance.
Most of the stone artifacts were made on a variety of black or gray siliceous shale pebbles, brown quartzite, and gray or white quartz. Based on an survey in 1980, the raw materials are thought to be collected from the western highland about 43km from the sites. No any stone gravel has been found in Salawusu valley. Most utilized pebbles are originally ranged from 20 to 40 mm in diameter;conse- quently the tools made from these raw materials are particularly minute with 25. 3mm long equally, 55 ×35 ×13. 2mm of the largest one and 7. 5 ×11 ×3mm of the smallest one so that were thought as “purement microlithique” by Henri Breuil (Boule et al., 1928. p. 125).
Most implements are flake tools, although some fashion on nuclei or pebbles have also been recovered. Simple direct percussion seems the common means of core reduction as well as pressure. Considering the minute size and according to the technique characters of the Salawusu retouch flakes and implements, pressure flaking seems to have been used in retouching commonly. In most cases, re- touching on specimens at Salawusu is meticulous and fine, although the cutting margins on more implements are rather sinuous. Typical implements include borers, side scrapers, notches, denticulates, end scrapers, burins, and micro-choppers, of which the borers are the most regular and the side scrap- ers are the most divers with simple, straight, double-edge, convergent, and transverse varieties represented.
Geologically, the early researchers distributed the Salawusu sites to the upper Malan Loess of North China, which is equal to the late Upper Pleistocene. However, recent research tends to suggest the early Upper Pleistocene, i. e. the stage 5 of MIS for the sites.
