A terrace toward the Ordos
Lingwu is a county-level city administered by Yinchuan, east of the Yellow River. In Linhe Town, on the edge of the Ordos, Shuidonggou is an open-air Palaeolithic site and an archaeological park. Palaeolithic names the old stone age, the long span of knapped tools before farming. The ground is east-bank ground, in Lingwu, across the river from the west-bank canals and from the foothill tombs. The park covers 7.8 square kilometres, and Linhe Town is the place. The river's passage through the city runs north past Lingwu. Shuidonggou sits on the Ordos side of that water, where the terrace opens away from the irrigated plain.
Two scholars and a field of struck stone
In 1923 the French scholars Émile Licent and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin excavated Shuidonggou. That first season overturned a claim that China had no Palaeolithic culture. Six excavation campaigns produced more than 30,000 stone artefacts and 67 fossil animal specimens. In 1988 the State Council listed the site in the third batch of national priority protected sites. The objects are the struck stones and the animal fossils, taken from open ground. Licent and Teilhard are the named people at the start of the dig; later campaigns added to the tools and the fossils. The terrace holds that arc: 1923 and the two French scholars, six campaigns, more than 30,000 artefacts and 67 fossils, national priority protection since 1988. The Ordos edge keeps the dig as open ground.
A museum shaped like a tool, and a Ming wall
The site museum stands in the scenic area. The building covers 4,308 square metres and is shaped like a stone tool, with a large semi-panorama of the excavation landscape. A line of the Ming Great Wall runs beside that landscape. The 67 fossil animal specimens belong with the struck stones as the material those campaigns took from the terrace. Three layers occupy one terrace. The earliest is the 1923 dig and the stone tools and fossils the campaigns recovered. The next is the museum, a modern building made to look like one of those tools, with the excavation country spread as a semi-panorama inside. The third is the Ming wall, a later military line sharing the edge of the same terrace. The wall is Ming masonry beside a Palaeolithic site. Together they give Yinchuan's administered ground an east-bank chapter: Linhe Town in Lingwu, the scholars' first season, the struck stones, and the wall that arrived many centuries afterward.