Archaeologists in China start new hunt for relics at 5,500-year-old site

Excavation at Sanxingcun, or Sanxing village, in Jiangsu province to begin again after 30-year hiatus

Scientists hope artefacts will shed light on daily life at the Neolithic settlement and the origins of Chinese civilisation

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Archaeologists have unearthed more than 4,000 artefacts and animal bones from the Sanxingcun site in eastern China. Photo: Weibo

Published: 9:00pm, 16 Apr 2023

Archaeologists will embark on a new excavation at a Neolithic site in eastern China to shed light on the lives of ancient people in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River more than 5,000 years ago.

The team is on a mission to unearth the residential and burial areas of the site at Sanxingcun, or Sanxing village, in the coastal province of Jiangsu to reveal its complex social structure, Li Moran, a researcher at the Institute of Archaeology under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told state news agency Xinhua.

“The village covered a big area and had a large population. There are significant differences in the number and quality of burial objects and a clear division between residential, handicraft production and burial zones.”

“This shows that the society was starting to become more complex and was possibly in a transition period from an equal society to an unequal one,” Li said, adding that the site was key to exploring the origins of Chinese civilisation.

He said the team hoped that the excavation, expected to be completed by the end of this year, would provide a deeper understanding of the layout of the settlement and enable a panoramic reconstruction of people’s lives at that time.

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