Xishuipo ( Chinese: 西水坡;

Pinyin Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese fo ...

: Xīshuǐpō) is a

Neolithic The Neolithic period, or New Stone Age, is an Old World archaeological period and the final division of the Stone Age. It saw the Neolithic Revolution, a wide-ranging set of developments that appear to have arisen independently in several pa ...

site in

Puyang Puyang is a prefecture-level city in northeastern Henan province, People's Republic of China. Located on the northern shore of the Yellow River, it borders Anyang in the west, Xinxiang in the southwest, and the provinces of Shandong and Hebei ...

Henan Henan (; or ; ; alternatively Honan) is a landlocked province of China, in the central part of the country. Henan is often referred to as Zhongyuan or Zhongzhou (), which literally means "central plain" or "midland", although the name is a ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, slig ...

, associated with the

Yangshao culture The Yangshao culture (仰韶文化, pinyin: Yǎngsháo wénhuà) was a Neolithic culture that existed extensively along the middle reaches of the Yellow River in China from around 5000 BC to 3000 BC. The culture is named after the Yangsh ...

. The site was excavated from 1987 to 1988; 186 burials were discovered at the site. In one of the burials, tomb M45, the body of a tall adult male was flanked by two mosaics formed from white clam shells, a

tiger The tiger (''Panthera tigris'') is the largest living Felidae, cat species and a member of the genus ''Panthera''. It is most recognisable for its dark vertical stripes on orange fur with a white underside. An apex predator, it primarily pr ...

design to the right and a

dragon A dragon is a reptilian legendary creature that appears in the folklore of many cultures worldwide. Beliefs about dragons vary considerably through regions, but dragons in western cultures since the High Middle Ages have often been depicted a ...

design to the left. Clam shell mosaics were also found in two nearby caches. The burial was accompanied by the bodies of three young children. Some archaeologists believe that the man was a

shaman Shamanism is a religious practice that involves a practitioner (shaman) interacting with what they believe to be a spirit world through altered states of consciousness, such as trance. The goal of this is usually to direct spirits or spir ...

References

* Allan, Sarah (ed), ''The Formation of Chinese Civilization: An Archaeological Perspective'', 1987 archaeological discoveries Archaeological sites in China Yangshao culture Neolithic sites of Asia {{Asia-archaeology-stub