ANALYSIS ON THE STRATIGRAPHIC CHRONOLOGY OF SITE 6056 IN KEHE PALEOLITHIC

Site 6056 is one of the most important representative discoveries of the Kehe paleolithic sites, and plays a very important role in the history of paleolithic archaeology in China; however,its age has been disputed. The mainstream view considers the relic culture belonged to the late period of the early Pleistocene or the early part of the middle Pleistocene, but, based on the analysis on the loess and field observations, we suggest that its age may not be such old and should belong to the late Pleistocene. One reason for the contrast dispute is due to lack of proper dating the cultural layers and the huge loess covering on the relic stratigraphy. In this paper, systematic OSL (optically stimulated luminescence)dating for the relic layers and the huge loess cover is made and the result shows that the age of site 6056 is about 80 ka. This result supports the conclusion based on our analysis of loess susceptibility and the chronology of mammalian lossil, which is greatly different from the traditional view.