关键词: 晚更新世早期;石制品;贾湾1号;丹江口库区

Abstract: The Jiawan locality 1, buried in the front margin of the third terrace on the right bank of the Danjiang River, is located in Jiawan village, Shengwan town, Xichuan County, Henan Province. This locality was excavated from early April to early May 2011 by the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (Chinese Academy of Sciences), as a salvageable archaeological project due to the construction of the Dangjiangkou reservoir dam at a higher latitude. The excavation exposed an area of about 1000 m2. Three stratigraphic layers of the third terrace were identified at this locality, with the total thickness of more than 4 meters. Archaeological materials were mainly unearthed from the 2nd to 3rd layer, two layers of grey-green to grey-yellow clay and brown-red clay, 1.5~3.5 m in thickness. A total of 750 stone artifacts and many cobbles were unearthed (N=527) and collected (N=223). The stone assemblage included: cores (46; 40 unearthed and 6 collected), retouched pieces (29; 26 unearthed and 3 collected), debitage (674; 461 unearthed and 213 collected), stone hammers (1 collected). The general features of these artifacts are summarized as follows:
1) Lithic raw materials were locally available from ancient riverbeds. Quartzite is the predominant raw material (74.00%) , followed by the vein quartz (24.27%).
2) The principal flaking technique is direct hammer percussion without core preparation.Chopper-core is the predominant type (28; 25 unearthed and 3 collected) of core. Most whole flakes were produced with a natural platform. Relatively high percentage (54.46%) of type III and VI flakes indicate that many whole flakes were in the later production stages.
3) Most stone artifacts (92.53%) are small and medium in size.
4) Only three classes of retouched pieces are identified, namely scrapers, denticulates, and bifaces, with scrapers being the dominant type (86.21%).
5) Most blanks for tool fabrication are flakes. Retouched pieces appear to be simply retouched by direct hammer percussion, mostly unifacially retouched on the distal end or the lateral sides of the blanks.
It can be inferred from the excavation and the analysis that the stone assemblage of the locality shows great similarity to that of Songwan and Baidutan Paleolithic localities in this region, which resemble the Oldowan-like industry (mode1). The unearthed chopper-cores, discoids, and polyhedrons are all typical tool types of the Oldowan assemblage in Africa. It should be noted that two proto-bifaces of simple flaking without standardized size and symmetry were recovered, which should not be assigned to the hallmarks of typical Acheulean assemblage. Geomorphological and chronological comparisons in the upper reaches of Hanshui River valley and the Danjiang River valley indicate that the geochronology of this locality should be close to Early Late Pleistocene.

Key words: Early Late Pleistocene; Stone artifacts; Jiawan locality 1; Danjiangkou Reservoir