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[[underline]] Chapter XVIII. [[/underline]] 382.
    
It will be recalled that here at the Wa Cha Hsieh there were clear signs of two and perhaps three periods of occupancy.  The two lower, though separated by what must have been a considerable interval of time, [[superscript]] (340[[)?]] [[/superscript]]
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[[superscript]] (340) [[/superscript]]    This was shown by the fact that when the sides of pits of the second habitation-level happened to intersect the upper portions of others belonging to the first they were carried directly through them and their contents in a manner which proved conclusively that the earlier ones had already become thoroughly compa^[[c]]ted.  This, according to Chinese builders, would require at the very least two generations and quite possibly a great deal longer than that.
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contained pit-dwellings of quite similar type, level for level; for in both, they had been constructed almost (though as we have seen, not quite entirely underground.  In what seemed, however, to be the remains of a third and therefore uppermost level of occupancy, the pits were much shallower; for they averaged only 1 1/2 meters in depth---not much more than half the figure usual in the two lower levels.  This fact suggests that during the last period of habitation, huts had come to project farther above ground, perhaps with their upper portions finished off in wattle-and-daub or some such material.  Beyond this, however there was nothing to indicate any beginnings of a transition from the circular and largely subterranean dwellings of the prehistoric folk to the rectangular mud huts, built entirely above ground, of the modern northern Chinese peasantry.
     It appears likely that the Neolithic people of the Wa Cha Hsieh site made it their practice to vacate their pit-dwellings yearly, just before the advent of the summer rainy season, and spend the latter (which was also, incidentally, the growing-season) in huts either raised on piles or built in trees, near their cultivated patches.  For not only could they thus better protect their crops from the ravages of wild beasts and birds; but owing to the winter's accumulation of refuse and the extremely porous nature of loess soil, the pit-dwellings must have been quite uninhabit-