Abstract:

The Nanjiagou Paleolithic site, located in Huailai County of Hebei Province, is a newly discovered and excavated site in North China. The site is situated in the Xinyao Village, Sangyuan Town and buried in the front margin of the second terrace on the right bank of the Yongding River. In September 2015, a joint archaeological team conducted a small-scale test excavation at the site. The excavation exposed one cultural layer with an area of about 10 m². An ash-heap and a total of 953 stone specimens, 355 animal fossils (including 1 ostrich eggshell and 3 ornaments), burned bones, a large amounts of lithic debris, as well as bone fragments were unearthed. The existing AMS ¹⁴C dating indicate that the age of this site is 17 ka~16 ka cal. BP, which also puts the site to the late stage of Upper Paleolithic in North China. The general features lithic assemblage include: 1) The raw materials for stone artifacts were mainly quarried from the gravel layers around the site, while a small amount of high-quality volcanic breccia may have been transported from a distance, and dolomite, siliceous limestone, and lava dominate the rock type; 2) The categories of 950 lithic assemblages include simple cores (n=4; 0.4%), microblade cores (n=50; 5.3%), simple flakes (n=604; 63.6%), microblades (n=86; 9.1%), bipolar flakes (n=3; 0.3%), retouched tools (n=61; 6.4%), chunks (n=142; 14.9%) with small in size. 3) The simple cores were made by direct hammer percussion and most flakes were produced from non-cortical platforms (96.4%) which indicating that they are mostly secondary flake products. All the microblade cores are wedge-shaped cores, with small size, and their refitted groups discovered at Nanjiagou site can reflect the technological procedure of knapping strategy. Some scholars divided wedge-shaped cores into four stages based on their production procedures and degree: prepared, flaking, suspended, and exhausted. The microblade cores and their refitted groups discovered at Nanjiagou site can reflect the technological process of these three stages. 4) The retouched tools are mostly made of chert which can be classified into scrapers, notches, endscrapers, bifacial points, adze-shaped tools, and choppers. There are also cases of using debris and gravel to produce stone tools, as well as reworking waste wedge-shaped cores into tools. Most of animal fossils are in poor condition and the fauna assemblage includes Cervus sp., Equus sp., Aves, Antilopinae, Rodentia, Carnivora and Bovidae, etc. It can be inferred that the discovery of the Nanjiagou site make great significance for improving the evolutionary sequence of lithic technology and systematically exploring the diversity of human survival behaviors during the late Upper Pleistocene in the Huailai Basin even North China.

Key words: Nanjiagou site, flake tool technology, microblade technology, Huailai Basin, late Upper Paleolithic