CRI听力：A Cultural Relic Site Named Baishi in Yantai City

Yantai city in East China's Shandong Province faces both the Yellow Sea and the Bohai Sea. It is crowned as the "Pearl in the Yellow Sea". In downtown Yantai, there is the Baishi cultural relic, which is the origin of Yantai's urban civilization, the root of the city. From there, you can learn about the lives of primitive men who lived in the region some 7,000 years ago. On today's travels, our reporter Xiao Hua will take you on a tour to the cultural site.

Reporter:

Yantai Baishi cultural site is located in the Zhifu district of Yantai. Once a village named Baishi, it is surrounded by many small hills.(www.hxen.net)

About the formation and discovery of the cultural site in Baishi Village, Curator of Yantai Museum, Wang Xiping, says the village's location and surrounding geography, as well as access to water, once made it an ideal location for primitive people to fish and hunt.

"The site sits close to the sea, about two or three kilometers. There used to be a river. The relic was built on a highland of Jinhuangding, with an altitude of 70 meters or so. Why did people set it up in such a high place? The sea level was high at that time, but the water couldn't reach this place due to its high altitude. Moreover, it was convenient to do fishing in the sea. The hills on the back were lushly forested, people could collect food there."

The site was discovered in 1972 during a cultural relic investigation. After excavations, many valuable relics were found in the village of the primitives. After studies and analysis, researchers believed the history of the site could be traced back to 7,000 years ago. Thus, Baishi became the earliest cultural relics in Shandong Province. Historians define it as "Baishi Culture".

The unearthed relics have been collected in Yantai Museum. If you want to know more about Baishi Culture, you got to visit the museum. Located in downtown Yantai, it used to be a traditional temple funded by some merchants over 100 years ago. In 1957, it was renovated into a museum.

In the museum, when you walk pass a few old, curly pine trees and a few round arch gates, you will arrive at the cultural relic exhibition hall of Baishi Village.

Curator Wang Xiping says on the Baishi cultural site, people can only see some white shells and sliced pottery on the broken earth layer. But in the museum, tourists can get much more information from the illustrative map of the earth layers of the site.

"The first layer is farming earth, which is about 30 centimeters. In the following layers, you can find clam shells and animal bones, which means people already raised domestic animals like pigs at that time. The earliest relics in Baishi are found in the fifth and sixth layers."(wwW.hxen.net)

Excavators have found over 700 pieces of pottery, stones and bones in Baishi Village and over 40,000 pieces of broken potteries, which can be repaired, as well as two tombs. These provided precious materials for research into the primitive culture on Shandong's Jiaodong Peninsula.

Wang Huanli, an expert on history of Yantai, says there's a treasure among the exhibits: a bone needle with a small eye.

"When tourists are here, they see this needle and would ask how the eye of the needle was made. You know, metal was not available back then. I said I didn't know either. Where did they find a diamond to puncture the needle and make the eye? Or how did they soften the bone and use another bone to puncture through it. It's hard to make a conclusion. Anyway, our primitive men were quite smart."

A millstone and a mill-stick were also excavated in the village of Baishi. Although these two stones were humble looking, they are witnesses of the earliest agricultural civilization of Yantai. The primitive men polished rocks into millstones and sticks, which they used to take off the shells of grains such as rice and millet.

Why has Baishi Culture been listed as a special type of culture by historians? Experts say on one hand, it's the earliest and most complete relic of the New Stone Age found in Jiaodong area. On the other hand, many clam shells, trumpet shells and fish bones were found in the earth layers. It's a unique shell grave relic, which couldn't be found in central China.

Yantai's rich cultural traditions not only make the local residents proud but also amaze many tourists. Zhou Qixin has traveled to many Chinese cities, but his trip to Yantai Baishi cultural site impressed him a lot.

"Before I came to Yantai, I didn't know Yanlai had such a long history. Here, I have learned the history of Yantai from the horse raising island of the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty to General Qi Jiguang who successfully resisted Japanese pirates in the Ming Dynasty. Later I went to Baishi village. There I learned that our ancestors had already lived in Yantai 7,000 years ago. It's quite impressive. I appreciate that the site is protected so well and tourists can learn Yantai's history from it."