The Lower Xiajiadian Site at Erdaojingzi in Chifeng, Inner Mongolia

     The site lies on the slopes of the hills lying to the north of the village of Erdaojingzi in the Hongshan District in Chifeng, Inner Mongolia, and encompasses an area of around 30,000 square metres. A rescue excavation was conducted on the site by the Inner Mongolia Cultural Relics and Archaeology Institute in April 2009, during which time some 5,200 square metres was uncovered.

The average depth of the cultural deposit at the site was about 8 metres and remains of the surrounding moat and city walls were excavated. The surrounding moat is elliptical in shape and it stretches 190 metres from north to south and 140 metres from east to west. The profile view of the moat is roughly V-shaped, with a mouth width of 11.8 metres, a base width of between 0.2 and 0.5 metres, and a depth of around 6.05 metres. The city walls are located within the moat's boundaries. The foundation base has a width of 9.6 metres and a height of around 6.2 metres. A gentle slope of cultural deposit has formed within the city walls and a number of house remains were found lying along the top of the city walls. The outer sections of the city walls have a steep incline similar to that of the interior walls of the enclosing moat.

     149 house remains have been discovered at the site and the majority of these are surface structures. Later houses were usually built on abandoned earlier houses. The lower structures may have been used as the foundations for the houses above them. At one location, seven layers of house remains were found. The original ground of different periods discovered during the excavation is one of the key evidence for the contemporaneity of the houses Clusters of two or three houses connected by ground which dates from  the same period are a common feature and the largest clusters found contain seven or eight houses. The majority of the houses are circular in shape and many are accompanied by galleries and or side chambers. Layers of adobe were used in the construction the walls and the tallest surviving wall has a height of around 2.1 metres. Short retaining walls constructed from adobe were built within the galleries, thus dividing them up into several small compartments. The individual compartments are linked together by gateways or doorways and some are lined with rows of post holes. The house floors had been plastered with a mud mixed with grass and many of them have floor-level hearths. Many of the doorways face south-west. These are marked by thresholds just outside the doorways and gate piers can be seen both sides the doorway. 

     F8 is a large and complex structure located in the northern section of the excavation site. Its walls are about 2 metres tall and the structure covers a total area of almost 110 square metres. 300 square metres of original ground has been unearthed to the south of F8, leading archaeologists to speculate that this may have been a small square. Other discoveries include four groups of relatively intact compounds consisting of courtyards, house remains and storage pits. The compounds lie along a north-south axis, which is enclosed and criss-crossed by roadways. 
     Pottery, stone and bone artifacts constitute the majority of the artifacts which have been unearthed at the Erdaojingzi site, although the excavations have also yielded a small number of jade artifacts and bronze ware. The bulk of the pottery excavated consisted of cylindrical li vessels, swollen-bellied li vessels, jar-shaped ding tripods, dou food containers, guan vessels, three-legged pan plates, and wide-mouth zun vessels. A variety of stone artifacts were found, including stone axes, blades, shovels, arrowheads, adzes, disks, balls, troughs, stone pestles and mortars, millstones, and grinding rods. The bone artifacts unearthed included long-tanged arrowheads, awls, shovels, needles, and hairpins. The jade artifacts included a selection of jade axes, rings, and pendants, while the bronze ware consisted of a number of bronze blades, awls, and trumpet-shaped earrings.
      The structures discovered at the site have survived intact and the site itself is thought to be one of the best preserved Lower Xiajiadian culture sites discovered to date. The perfectly preserved ground surfaces are valuable for the research of the relationship between the site's various cultural features. The moat, city walls, courtyards, building foundations, vaults and roadways have provided scholars with a wealth of new information on the settlement patterns and social organization of that period. The house remains found in the various overlapping cultural layers show that the site was inhabited over several different periods. An investigation of the site's changing settlement patterns could help reconstruct the course of the site's initial settlement, renovation, expansion, re-establishment and eventual abandonment.    (Translated by Kelly McGuire)