A mountain of knowledge

Yanshanzhai site, the Lingnan region's largest known human settlement from the Neolithic period-defined in China as between 10,000 and 4,000 years ago-was found on a mountain in Yingde, a city in the north of Guangdong province.

Since 2019, a joint archaeological team drawn from Guangdong Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, Peking University and several museums has excavated a residential area and 66 tombs at the site, spreading across an area of 80,000 square meters, as announced during an online conference organized by the National Cultural Heritage Administration earlier this month.

The bountiful discovery of burial objects amazed the archaeologists, not only because of the exquisite jade artifacts, but also their reflection of the division among social strata, a key indicator of an infant civilization.

"They offer crucial clues in studying how an early society gets complicated," says Liu Suoqiang, a researcher with the Guangdong institute who is leading the ongoing excavation. "In high-level tombs, jade items were widely buried, and many other varieties of burial objects were found."

For example, from one of the tombs, archaeologists recovered as many as 140 jade articles.

"But in the lower-level ones, only scattered stones and pottery items were found," Liu explains. "It clearly shows stratification of a society."