Digital reconstruction on geographical environment of Neolithic human activities in the Lingjiatan site of Chaohu City, East China

摘要

The Chaohu Lake Basin is an important area for ancient human activities in East China. The Lingjiatan site, which is located at the southeast of Chaohu City, Anhui Province, and 35 km north to the Yangtze River and 5 km south to the Taihu Mountain, is the most representative Neolithic Age site with advanced jade-carving techniques in this area. The 14C date of Lingjiatan Site is about 5600~5300aBP, contemporary with the Hongshan culture and earlier than the Liangzhu culture, which falls into the Mid-Holocene epoch. Based on mid-high resolution remote sensing image and former archaeological materials, combining with the field investigation and sampling analysis of archaeological site profile of Lingjiatan Site as well as core drilling in the Chaohu Lake, the paper reconstructs climate environment of the Lingjiatan site and the environmental background of ancient human activities during Mid-Holocene. The research results show that: (1)The Lingjiatan ancients lived in the Holocene Optimum, its culture development was in interim phase under climate transformed from warm and wet to cool and dry. (2)The ground surface which was deposited in the last phase of late Pleistocene epoch (OSL dating is 11.6 ±1.0 ka BP)was the living ground for the Lingjiatan ancient human. The sedimentary discontinuous surface may be caused by strong fluvial erosion under the warm and humid climatic condition in Mid-Holocene. (3)Originally, paleo-geomorphy surface was a level shallow mesa foreside southern part of Taihu Mountain, but was cut by fluvial water follow and the geomorphologic configuration was formed “finger-like” features alternately with strip hillocks and rivers. The features can be seen evidently on the Landsat ETM+ remote sensing image, especially the depression area, which is now cropland, was interpreted as the palaeochannels at that time; its soil water content is high. (4)Based on the remote sensing image interpretation, it shows that the site was in a “peninsula shape” environment which had rivers flowing around the east, west and south sides of Changgang terrain, and that was good for rice planting, hunting, fishing and water transportation. (5)The most particular characteristic of Lingjiatan site is the advanced jade production, those maybe have some relationships with the convenient shipping, trade exchanges and optimal environmental conditions, which was conducive to the rice agricultural production.