Long before the Shang or Zhou dynasties, and roughly two millennia before the pyramids of Giza, a Neolithic community on the middle Yangtze River had already built something recognizable as a town: encircled by earthen walls and a moat, its space carefully zoned into separate districts for housing, farming, craft production, worship, and burial. Chengtoushan, in Hunan Province, is regarded by Chinese archaeologists as the earliest walled settlement yet discovered in China, dated to roughly 6,000 years old on the basis of radiocarbon analysis of excavated charcoal — making it a foundational site for understanding how urban life first emerged along the Yangtze, independently of the better-known early cities of the Yellow River basin.
Chengtoushan was discovered in 1979, located roughly 10 kilometers northwest of Lixian County in Changde, Hunan. Systematic excavation began in 1991 and continued through more than a dozen seasons of fieldwork over the following two decades, ultimately opening close to 9,000 square meters of the site and recovering over 16,000 artifacts — stone tools, pottery vessels, jade ornaments, and bone implements — along with the remains of pottery kilns, altars, roads, houses, and burial grounds. The site's discoveries were significant enough to be named among China's top ten archaeological finds nationally on two separate occasions, in 1992 and again in 1997, and it was later included among the hundred most important archaeological discoveries of 20th-century China.
