Preliminary research on stone artifacts unearthed from the Houtaomuga site in 2012

<p indent="0mm">Located on the south bank of the Tao’er River in the lower reaches of the Nenjiang River, the Houtaomuga site was excavated for five consecutive years from 2011 to 2015. The site includes the remains of several periods, including the Paleolithic-Neolithic transitional stage, the Neolithic Age, the Bronze Age and the Liao and Jin Dynasties. The site covers an area of nearly 1.41 million square meters, with a dense area of 550,000 square meters. In this paper, we take the stone artifacts from the Houtaomuga culture in 2012 as the object of study, and technically analyze stone artifacts through technology-typology and comparative analysis. 454 pieces of stone artifacts were excavated, and the types include cores, flakes, tools, river gravels, chunks, drilled artifacts and ground artifacts, etc. Stone artifacts were predominantly of the river gravel and chunks, followed by cores and tools. The types of tools include scrapers, point and bruin, which have been exquisitely repaired and standardized to a high degree. The technical observation of cores shows that the morphology and technology of stone flake-type products show a certain correlation with the preparation and repair of microblade core, and the typical feature of microblade core is the repair of the wedge-shaped rim, which has two kinds of repairs: reciprocal and one-sided stripping, and the technology is stable and skillful, and the preparation procedure will be simplified according to the characteristics of the blanks. Combined with the remains containing microblade technology found in the Nenjiang River Basin during the same period, certain commonalities and characteristics are shown. In addition to the microblade technology, ground artifacts, drilled artifacts and pottery, which has not yet been mentioned in this paper, were also found in the site. Abundant archaeological remains indicate that group mobility of these hunter-gatherers slowly reduced with a tendency towards a more organized society.