Zhoukoudian

Zhoukoudian is also called as Choukoutien, is one of the worlds most popular archeological site situated in Beijing, China. This is a cave system which has yield several archeological discoveries including the Peking Man. It has been seventy-five years since the Swedish geologist Andersson (1934) discovered this site in 1921. Since then, Zhoukoudian has become one of the most valuable places in the world for the study of early human ancestry. The chronological position of Zhoukoudian was recently recalibrated by uranium series dating of the two calcite samples which was taken from the stalagmites flowstone layer intercalated in one to two layers. As of 1989, more than fifty articles and books in Chinese, and at least thirty-five in English had been published about the Zhoukoudian cave site. In 1990, the most recent book about Zhoukoudian appeared, bringing together much of what we know about the nature of the site, including a systematic history of the entire Zhoukoudian excavation. In 1994, the earliest standard reference of the 1934 excavation report by Pei Wenzhong was republished. Yet, among all these Zhoukoudian publications, only a few focuses upon the stone tool technologies from the site, and most of these are in Chinese.

Much of the knowledge we have of hominid behavior at Zhoukoudian is based on the investigation of tool technologies. According to the original excavation report, more than 10,000 stone tools have been recovered since the site was first excavated in 1921. Forty-four different raw materials were used by the ancient inhabitants of the cave, and 89 per cent of this raw material is quartz. The remainder of the raw materials used includes 5 per cent rock crystal, 3 per cent sandstone, 2 percent cert and 1 percent 'other' kinds of raw materials. The quartz was quarried from a marble and granite source about 2 km from the site. The rest of the raw materials can easily be found in the 'Lower Gravel Layer' at the foot of Longgushan. The ancient knappers selected raw materials from near the home site, perhaps because of local environmental conditions and the limitation of the stone types in the immediate area. The quality of the local quartz is not uniform, hence some cobbles were better suited to tool manufacture than others, and about 50 per cent of the specimens found at Zhoukoudian are waste pieces from the manufacturing process.

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