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In recent years, the archaeological excavations of the Jimingcheng site have achieved important results: large-scale wooden structures, huge rice husk chaff accumulation, super-large-scale settlement clusters, triple ring trenches and water canal systems, and rice field areas have been discovered and confirmed, which provide vivid materials for understanding Jimingcheng and provide important archaeological evidence for the study of the prehistoric civilization process in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River. How was the ruins of Chicken City discovered? How is its nature recognized? Combing and restoring the discovery and understanding process of the ruins of Jiming City will help to carry out better work in the future. To this end, we specially invited Cao Chuansong, a researcher who was the cultural relics specialist of the former Lixian Cultural Center and later served as the director of the Lixian Museum for a long time, to write about the beginning and end of the discovery of the ruins of Jiming City, and authorized the Hunan Archaeological Network to publish it.
In 1974, as the first batch of cultural relics specialists of the Lixian Cultural Center, I embarked on the road of cultural relics and archaeology, when people were completely unfamiliar with the word "archaeology", and all work had to start from scratch. I first based myself on the cultural relics survey in the northern Hunan region, mainly through consulting the extremely limited historical materials of Fang Zhi and going deep into the fields to conduct field investigations, in order to find out the distribution of cultural relics in the county.
After learning that the Lixian Archives had a book entitled "Lizhou Chronicle", I took the introduction letter of the Cultural Center and consulted Qing Tongzhi's "Zhili Lizhou Zhizhi" in the archives, and when asking for a loan, its administrator looked at me, a young man who was inconspicuously dressed, and said: "The system in the museum stipulates that it can only be consulted, not borrowed." I had to introduce myself and talk to him about the archaeological work such as the 2,000-year-old female corpse unearthed in Mawangdui, which worked so well that the administrator agreed to borrow it for 10 days. After careful reading, I quickly found related records such as "Chicken Calling City, ShenMing City, Song Yucheng" and so on. In the "Zhili Lizhou Chronicle and Monuments", it is written: "The chicken is called the city, the state is twenty miles, the plain protrudes from the earth, the surrounding is like a ring, about 400 zhang, the middle is very flat, the four doors are opposite, not like the generation." It is said that the immortals built this at night, and the chicken chirped and stopped, hence the name. "The name Chicken City has been haunting me ever since.
In May 1975, the unit arranged for me to take some photos reflecting the changes in rural schools for the "Exhibition of the Achievements of the Education Revolution in Lixian County", and gave me the only "permanent" brand bicycle and the "Seagull 135" camera for me to shoot. One day, the comrades of the Cultural and Educational Bureau took me to the Shunan Commune to take pictures, mainly to take photos related to the children's martial arts class of Dongtianyan and Zinan Primary School. After entering The South of The City, I have been chanting chicken calling city in my heart, and the comrades who led the team were also very interested in chicken calling city after listening to my introduction, and I also found out that chicken calling city is located in the Wenjia brigade, and it is just going to pass by Zinan Primary School, so I decided to go to chicken city to have a look first. This place name is well-known in the local household, but there are not many people who know its historical evolution, and an elderly farmer was interviewed and said: "Legend has it that two immortals, a daughter-in-law and a father-in-law, bet on the construction of the city at night, because of the chicken crowing, so the city wall was not repaired, leaving several gaps in the city wall." The old farmer pointed to a mound of earth in the east and west outside the city and said, "Then the walls built by the two gods and immortals." Because no pottery pieces were collected at that time, it was impossible to determine the age of the city site, but the common people reported that they had dug out copper swords on it, and the preliminary judgment was that it was the site of the Eastern Zhou City.
When I went to Dongtianyan Elementary School to shoot that day, I also found a lot of pottery pieces and tombs in the ditches around the school wall, which was initially judged to be a Neolithic site and an Eastern Zhou tomb group. At that time, Wanwan did not expect that a few years later, the two points of Jiming City and Dingjiagang had become national key cultural relics protection units.
In the spring of 1979, receiving a notice from the Hunan Provincial Museum, it was planned to excavate a Neolithic site in Lixian County in winter, and I suggested that it be set at the Dingjiagang site of the Dongtianyan Brigade of the Liannan Commune, and immediately after obtaining consent, I went to the site to carry out preliminary investigation and preparations, and when passing through The City of Jiming, I found that the site had been greatly changed (the distance between the City of Jiming and the Site of Dingjiagang was about 2 kilometers in a straight line), a trunk canal up to 10 meters wide destroyed the northern part of the site from east to west, the chimney in the south of the site was towering, and the bulldozer of the brick factory swallowed up the southern city wall. Pottery pieces and other pieces are scattered on the ground, which is stifling. I immediately approached the commune leaders to negotiate, but to no avail. I also reported to the Hunan Provincial Museum that Comrade He Jiejun, the head of the Archaeological Department, quickly came to Lixian County and proposed a solution: first, to determine the winter excavation plan; second, to deal with the production of the Jimingcheng Brick Farm. After our publicity of cultural relics work, the commune party committee had some understanding, stopped taking soil on the city wall, and after many negotiations, the commune finally agreed to the relocation of the brick factory, so that the original appearance of the east and west walls of the city of Jiming was preserved, until the brick kiln was abandoned in 1981, and the ruins of the city of Jiming were no longer damaged.
In 1986, the second census of cultural relics was carried out nationwide, and on April 2, the census of the ruins of Jiming City was registered, number 313. In 1991, the ruins of Jiming City were announced as a county-level cultural relics protection unit. In 1994, the Lixian People's Government issued the "Notice on Doing a Good Job in the Protection and Management of the Two Ruins of Bashiyuan and Jimingcheng" to strengthen protection.
In January 1997, the sixth archaeological excavation of the Chengtou Mountain site was completed, which further clarified the stratigraphic superposition relationship of the Chengtou Mountain City Wall built four times, and also found the remains of rice fields in the Tangjiagang cultural period under the first phase of the city wall, which made archaeologists in Hunan Province have a new understanding of the prehistoric city site in the Lishui River Basin. Mr. He Jiejun asked for my opinion, and the first thing I thought of was the chicken city, so the Hunan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology decided to conduct a trial excavation of the ruins of the chicken city, hoping to solve the problem of the age of the city site. From March 19, 1997 to April 8, 1997, Cao Yi of the County Cultural Relics Management Office conducted a test excavation of Jiming City and excavated a 2-meter-wide and 10-meter-long trench on the outer slope of the western city wall of the site. On April 9, Mr. Zhang Zhongpei, Yan Wenming and Mr. He Jiejun braved the rain to inspect the test excavation site of Jiling City, and the preliminary judgment was that it was the site of the city during the Qujialing and Shijiahe periods. In the winter of 1998, the Hunan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology once again made small-scale excavations and determined that the ruins of JimingCheng belonged to the ancient cities of Qujialing and Shijiahe cultural periods.
Zhang Zhongpei and Mr. Yan Wenming were in Chicken City
Mr. Zhang Zhongpei and Mr. Yan Wenming at the archaeological site
Mr. Zhang Zhongpei and Mr. Yan Wenming listened to the report on the spot
Reprinted from Hunan Archaeology