House-foundation No. 15 on the Diaolongbei site in Zaoyang city is a large-sized earth floor artificially baked to red, remaining of a multi-room building, and has a rectangular plan further divided into seven rectangles. Along the outer and inner wall lines, closely-arranged post-holes were discovered together with grooves as the remains of eight push-and-pull doors. Each partition left behind a fireplace and, in some cases, a ruined storeroom. The floor is made of lime and a material similar to concrete, and 93 objects were found scattered on it. These belong to the types of pottery jar, basin, grinding bowl, bowl, dou stemmed vessel, small cup and curve-bellied cup, and stone axe, adze, spade, hoe, plough and si spade. The remains are assigned to the third phase of the Diaolongbei site, going back to c. 5000 BP.
The Diaolongbei site in Zaoyang City,Hubei,is the remains of a Neolithic settlement located at the confluence of the Changjiang and Huanghe rivers.A lot of house-foundations were found to contatin much charcoal.The present paper reports the species identification of the charcoal samples un-earthed from the site by means of light microscope and scanning electron microscopes.The results show that the samples belong to sawtooth oak (Quercus acutissima) and eucommia(Eucommia ulmoides) respectively.The other data obtained include information on the wood exploitation of the prehistoric population,as well as paleoenvironmental and paleoclimatic evidence.
