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 publishing the third batch of district-level protected sites, intangible cultural heritage projects and transmitters (Li Zheng Fa [2017] No. 197, dated the twenty-second day of the eleventh month of 2017), the site is item 9 of a list of ten, recorded as Neolithic, and its location under the name then current, Shishan, Shiqiu Town; Shiqiu Town became Shiqiu Subdistrict in 2018, and address uses the current name. The remarks column for the item is empty, and neither the notice nor the list gives a protected boundary.

The hill and its present use

In September 2025 the district government's Shiqiu Subdistrict column wrote, under its heading on cultural substance: Shiqiu has a deep historical foundation, people having lived there for thousands of years, and Shishan Park was built directly on a Neolithic site. This is the only official page yet traced that links Shishan Park to a Neolithic site. The sentence gives only the order of magnitude, "a few thousand years ago", and gives no extent, stratification or finds.

A report carried by China Jiangsu Net, reprinting Nanjing Daily (May 2022), records that Shishan Park lies by Xinhe South Road in Shiqiu and that, as a disused quarry, the place had been overgrown and strewn with loose rock until an ecological restoration turned the bare hill green and the waste pits into clear pools. In other words, by the time of that report the hill had been worked out as a quarry and then restored into a park.

The two accounts each give one side and must be told apart: the official page says the park was built on a Neolithic site, the media report says the hill had been a disused quarry and was ecologically restored. Nothing traced shows how the site was preserved through quarrying and park building, and no heritage authority statement on this has been found, so this entry makes no inference as to whether the site remains in place or was disturbed.

Remains and dating

The district list gives only period, level and location; it gives neither the extent, the area nor the deposits of the site. No excavation report, survey report or annual report from an archaeological station has been traced for it, so this entry describes neither cultural layers, features nor finds.

era reproduces only the general period "Neolithic" as recorded, and is not narrowed to a closer range. Lishui was established as a county in the eleventh year of the Kaihuang era (591 CE), so the period here falls some millennia before that.

Open questions

• The extent and area of the site, and whether the place-name Shishan denotes the same range as the hill or ridge, are untraced.
• "The park was built on a Neolithic site" and "the hill had been a disused quarry, ecologically restored" stand side by side; no material supports any statement on how the deposits survived the disturbance.
• The list gives only "Neolithic", with no closer dating. Whether the material can be linked typologically to the Majiabang, Beiyinyang, Songze, Lingjiatan or Liangzhu sequences known in the Nanjing region is not assessed here, as no artefacts from the site are held.