On December 20, the reporter learned from the "2023 Henan Archaeological Work Achievement Exchange Meeting" that archaeologists discovered the Longshan cultural burial area at the Suyang site in Yiyang, which is the cemetery with the largest area and the largest number of tombs found in the Central Plains so far.
At the exchange meeting, Ren Guang of the Luoyang Institute of Archaeology reported on the archaeological excavation of the Suyang site in Yiyang in 2023.
Suyang ruins are located in the west of Suyang Village, Zhangwu Town, Yiyang County, Luoyang City, south of Xia Village, located on the south bank of the Luohe River, on the second-level, first-class terraces, north of the Luohe River, south of the Bears Ears Mountain, showing a high trend in the south and low in the north, the east and west sides of the site are surrounded by natural gullies, forming a natural protective barrier. The site is about 970 meters wide from east to west, about 1,050 meters long from north to south, with an area of about 630,000 square meters, and the cultural layer is accumulated up to more than 5 meters thick.
According to Ren Guang, the archaeological excavation work in 2023 will be carried out in three areas: the living area, the Yangshao tomb area, and the Longshan tomb area, with an excavation area of 500 square meters. Up to now, the archaeological staff has excavated 75 tombs on the east side of the outer ditch of the site, and some of the tombs have broken the relationship between them, and it is preliminarily speculated that the age of the tomb area should be the Longshan culture period. The tombs are all vertical pit tombs, with their heads facing west or northwest, and there are two kinds of burial styles: upright limbs and lateral straight limbs, and a small number of river pebbles are placed on the four walls of the tombs. The vast majority of the tombs did not have burial goods, and a few tombs were buried with jade or stone tools.
Ren Guang said that the newly discovered Longshan cultural burial area is the largest cemetery with the largest number of tombs found in the Central Plains so far, and there are few large-scale cemeteries found in this period, and this discovery is of great significance for the study of the burial system, social organization structure, social production technology and other issues at that time.