ABSTRACT
Archaeologists who specialize in the Paleolithic period have unearthed more than a dozen sites in the Three Gorges area. All of the sites are from the mid and late stages of the Paleolithic. Another great discovery is the so-called Ba-Shu Culture. In the past, the Three Gorges area was thought to be associated primarily with the Ba Culture, but we were unclear about where the center of the culture lay. Since the late 1970s, more digs have been carried out in the Xiling Gorge area in Hubei Province, some at very small sites, but we learned very little. But now, finally, we have found two sites that formed the center of the Ba Culture. One is Shuangyantang, on the banks of the upper reaches of the Daning River near Wushan. A second site, Lijiaba at Yunyang, Sichuan Province, also represents an early stage of the Ba Culture.
