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[[underlined]] Chapter IV. [[/underlined]]
66.

had been the practice to throw broken pottery.
Mingled with this very plentiful coarse gray (or grayish-brown) ware we found also a few fragments of another type, thinner, harder, better levigated, and reddish-buff in color; these, possibly wheelmade, seemed closely similar if not actually identical in character to some of the shards which we had seen a few weeks before at Hsin Chêng Hsien (45). This

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(45)
On the Hsin Chêng pottery see pp. 28 [[underlined]] sq. [[/underlined]]
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ware, it seemed at least possible, may have been the descendant of that found in the "painted pottery" of northern and northwestern Chinese sites of Neolithic and Chalcolithic date (46). Whether the two form in reality

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(46)
The use of the word "Aeneolithic" to designate the cultural period intervening between the Neolithic and the Bronze Ages is to be deprecated. Not only is it a hybrid compound, incorrectly formed; but it so closely resembles in sound the word "Neolithic" that its employment often leads to confusion.
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members of a continuous ceramic series, only further excavation and study can determine.
In neither the circular nor the rectangular mounds did our search reveal potsherds of any of the well known later historical periods. This circumstance seemed to establish a fairly definite presumption that the mounds were pre-Han in date.
After lunching at a little peasant village we worked westward back over the site, across the same cultivated flood-plain, built up of materials washed down from the deforested hills a short distance to the west. In doing so we followed a course considerably farther south and west than that which we had taken in the morning. We found however no more mounds or other remains of interest appearing on or above the surface; and for digging we had no time. As the day wore on, we turned more and more to the northwest. Toward sunset we recrossed the north branch or fork of