The Neolithic Remains at the Shishan Site

The Shishan Site lies at what is now Shishan, Shiqiu Subdistrict, Lishui District. In the list attached to the district government's notice on the third batch of district-level protected sites (Li Zheng Fa [2017] No. 197, 22 November 2017), the site is item 9, its period is recorded as the Neolithic, and its location under the name then current is Shishan, Shiqiu Town; Shiqiu Town became Shiqiu Subdistrict in 2018, and this entry uses the current name. The "remarks" column is empty, and neither the notice nor the list gives a protected extent or boundary.

What this entry has is the district list's own record. The list gives neither the extent, the area nor the stratigraphy of the site, and neither an excavation report nor a survey report for it has been traced. This entry therefore describes neither cultural layers, features nor finds, and does not infer a precise date from the general period "Neolithic". The site's protected status, batch and address are recorded in the related entry "Shishan Site".

The site and Shishan Park

Two materials each speak to one side, and must be told separately.

The Shiqiu Subdistrict page of the district government (September 2025) states, under the section on a rich cultural endowment: "Shiqu Subdistrict has a deep historical endowment; people have lived and multiplied here as early as several thousand years ago, and Shishan Park was built on a Neolithic site." This is the only official web statement this library has traced that links "Shishan Park" directly to a "Neolithic site". The sentence gives only the order of magnitude "several thousand years ago", and no extent, stratigraphy or finds.

A report carried by China Jiangsu Net reprinting Nanjing Daily (May 2022) records that Shishan Park lies beside the new river road at Shiqu, and that "as an abandoned mine, this place was once overgrown with weeds and strewn with loose rock. After one round of ecological remediation, the barren hill turned green and the waste pits became clear ponds." That report describes the state of the hill at the time of reporting; it nowhere mentions the Shishan Site, nor archaeology, stratigraphy or finds.

The two sit at different chronological levels: the official page says the park was built on a Neolithic site, while the press report says the hill was once an abandoned quarry later remediated. No item this library has seen explains how the archaeological layers were preserved amid the quarrying and the park works, and no cultural relics authority has been found to say so; accordingly this entry makes no inference about whether the site remains in situ or has been disturbed.

Basis for the date

time.start is set to -3000 (about 3000 BCE), at a precision of century and marked as approximate. The figure is simply a mid-point for the general period "Neolithic", used to place the site roughly on a timeline; it is not a measured date for the site and not the date of any find. Lishui became a county in the eleventh year of the Kaihuang era (591 CE), and the date here falls about three thousand six hundred years before that, outside the range of the county's administrative history; the basis is given above.

Open questions

• The extent and area of the site, and whether the place name "Shishan" denotes the same ground as the site, are both unobtained.
• "Shishan Park was built on a Neolithic site" and "the hill was once an abandoned quarry, ecologically remediated" stand side by side, and nothing documents how the archaeological layers fared through the quarrying and the park works.
• The list gives only "Neolithic", with no finer dating. Whether typological links can be drawn between this site and the known Neolithic cultural sequences of the Nanjing area cannot be settled, as this library holds no specimen from the site, and no comparison is made.
• The formal published text of the third-batch list, and any record of the site at a higher protection level, are unobtained; this entry rests only on the list attached to Li Zheng Fa [2017] No. 197.