Large cutting tools in the Danjiangkou Reservoir Region, central China

Abstract

Handaxe-bearing sites in China are currently known to occur in a number of alluvial basins, the best known being Dingcun, Bose and Luonan. Bose in the south and Luonan in central China on the northern margin of the Qinling Mountains are most familiar to English-speaking researchers. Here we document the Danjiangkou Reservoir Region (DRR) as another major area for large cutting tools (LCTs), located in central China on the southeastern edge of the Qinling Mountains. Large cutting tools are preserved in three terraces of the Han and Dan Rivers in Hubei and Henan Provinces, with dates from ca. 0.8 Ma (millions of years ago) (Terrace 4) to the first half of the Middle Pleistocene (Terrace 3), and possibly to the Late Pleistocene (Terrace 2). This paper reports on LCTs discovered in Terraces 3 and 2, with a majority from the older terrace (and one specimen from Terrace 4). Regional environments during the Middle Pleistocene were relatively warm, humid and stable. Despite the poor quality of raw materials (predominantly quartz phyllite and trachyte for the LCTs), good examples of both handaxes and cleavers are present, plus two types of picks. The LCT technology is compared and contrasted with other Asian industries and with the Acheulean. Overall the DRR LCTs show both technological and morphological similarities with Acheulean LCTs, with some differences that are mainly attributed to raw material properties, subsistence ecology, and ‘cultural drift.’ The DRR LCTs expand the range of morphological variability of the East Asian material and highlight the need for greater reliance on technological analysis and raw material evaluation for best comparison of Chinese assemblages with the Acheulean tradition.