Preliminary Report on the Paleolithic Remains from Red Clay of Zhangzhou,Fujian Province

Fifteen Paleolithic sites were discovered in north-west part of Zhangzhou City in August,2003.Sixty-seven pieces of stone artifacts have been unearthed from upper and lower brick red clay beds,11 pieces are collected on surface.The stone artifacts consist of cores,flakes,stone hammers,scrapers,chopper or chopping tools,points and pick.All of there were made of cobbles or broken rocks and crudely fashioned by stone hammer.Besides point,most of stone tools are rather large.The raw materials include quartzite,quartz-sandstone,vein quartz and volcanic rocks.The characteristics of the artifacts found in Zhangzhou indicate that they are similar to those found in the Lianhuashan Site of Zhangzhou County.Red clay deposits are widely distributed in Zhangzhou area.At the section of ZP003 site,the red clay sediment sequence consists of 4 parts from bottom to top:1)Reddish yellow reticulated red clay;2)thick layer of reddish brown red clay;3)lower brick red clay;4)upper brick red clay.There are gravel beds or sandy gravels are intercalated between the neighboring red clay layers(see Fig.1).Author suggests that the lower brick red clay belongs to early-Late Pleistocene and upper brick red clay belongs to late-Late Pleistocene.So the lower cultural layer may be of Middle Paleolithic and upper cultural layer of ZP003 Site and other sites may be attributed to late Paleolithic.