From 2000 to 2002,two seasons of archaeological excavation were carried out on the Tianmu-Mountain site in the north of Jiangyan City proper in Taizhou City,Jiangsu Province.Tianmu Mountain stands high and,like an island,is surrounded by waters almost on all the four sides.The two seasons of work opened 41 excavation trenches and squares,covering an area of 1,167 sq m in total,and drilling exploration was also made in some spots.The site can be affirmed to be the ruins of a Western Zhou city consisting of an inner sub-city and an outer one,where house foundations,ash-pits,ash-trenches and tombs were revealed along with pottery,stone implements and other objects.It is not so large in size but,with its structure combining the inner and outer sub-cities and waters skirting the periphery,possesses the style characteristic of ancient cities in the water-net region of South China.In cultural nature,it embodies the Western Zhou cultural aspect of the eastern Yangtze-Huaihe valley and must have been a representative center of this region.The unearthed object sets show that in the early and mid Western Zhou,the city shared some common features of the Zhou culture in the Yangtze-Huaihe valley and distinctly differed from the cultural elements in the Ningbo-Zhenjiang region except for the plain li tripod as a common thing.In the late Western Zhou,it began to have more features in common with that region.Within the Yangtze-Huaihe valley,the Tianmu-Mountain site shares identity with Yizheng Gancao-Mountain site and quite differs from the Caowangchengzi and Jiangchengzi sites that lie to the west of Yiliu Hills and feature mainly cord-mark li.According to literal records,the then eastern Yangtze-Huaihe region was the territory of the ancient Gan State’s activities.So the archaeological culture represented by the Tianmu-Mountain and Gancao-Mountain sites excavated in this region must have been closely related to the Gan State,and the study of the cultural features of the present site is helpful to researching into the culture
