A zooarchaeological analysis of the burned bone from the Shizitan Site 9, Shanxi, China
Received date: 2019-01-28
Revised date: 2019-06-04
Online published: 2020-09-10
Located at the Gaolouhe village, Jixian County of the Shanxi Province, the Shizitan site(Locality 9) is roughly 7 km to the Yellow River. Discovered in 2000, this site was systematically excavated in 2001, 2002 and 2005. Along with thousands of lithic tools of microblade technology, a dozen of organic artifacts and lithic grinding tools, plenty of faunal remains were recovered from the 3 field seasons of excavation. Based mainly on an observation of the taphonomic features of the faunal remains from Layer 4(12,575-11,600 cal. BP) and Layer 5(ca. 13,000 cal. BP), particularly of the small-sized bone fragments from the site, it could be argued that the burned bones here are most probably a palimpsest of several episodes of human behavior centering around the hearth, including but not limited to roasting meat, burning bones for site maintenance and as a supplementary source of fuel. Besides, it seems clear that humans at the site moved the fire residues out of the fireplace and later on dumped them at its peripheries.
Key words： Shizitan site; Burned bones; Taphonomy; Zooarchaeology; Paleolithic
Shuangquan ZHANG , Yanhua SONG , Yue ZHANG , Le XU , Lei LI , Jinming SHI . A zooarchaeological analysis of the burned bone from the Shizitan Site 9, Shanxi, China[J]. Acta Anthropologica Sinica, 2019 , 38(04) : 598 -612 . DOI: 10.16359/j.cnki.cn11-1963/q.2019.0047
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