Site formation processes at Donggutuo: a major Early Pleistocene site in the Nihewan Basin, North China

Abstract

Understanding site formation processes is crucial for interpreting archaeological meaning is vaguecontext patterns and hominin behavior as these affect the preserved condition of a site and the integrity of archaeological remains. The fluvio-lacustrine sequences in the Nihewan Basin of North China are rich sources of early Pleistocene archaeological sites, which offer an important region to investigate human evolution and adapted behaviors in East Asia. Although many Paleolithic sites have been reported from the Nihewan Basin, North China, few of them focus on site formation processes before interpreting hominin behavior. Here, we present a site formation study of four archaeological layers (Layers 6D, 6C, 6B and 6A) in Trench 1 from Donggutuo (namely DGT-T1) site in the Nihewan Basin with an age of 1.1 Ma. Through the study of sedimentary contexts, spatial distributions of artifacts and fossils, intra-assemblage category ratios, debitage size distributions, lithic abrasion, orientations of elongated pieces and dip analysis of planar items, our results show that all the layers had been disturbed by low energy sheet wash across the lake shore setting, but to differing extents.