Abstract: Longgangsi site is located in the southern piedmont of the Qinling Mountains, which is found in the early 1950s. Locality 3 of Longgangsi site is on the fourth terrace in the southern bank of the Hanjiang River. From February to June in 2014, a systematical excavation was carried out by a joint archaeological team from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of Chinese Academy of Science, Shaanxi provincial institute of Archaeology, Nanjing University, and Longgangsi Heritage Administrative Committee. The excavation exposed a total area of 36 m2, with 4441 stone artifacts yielded. The stone assemblage is consist of manuports (n=23; 0.51％ ), cores (n=63; 1.42%), flakes (n=1179; 26.55%), chunks (n=1636; 36.84%), chips (n=1489; 33.53%), and retouched tools (n=51; 1.15%), which include scrapers (n=47), points (n=2), and burins (n=2). The general features of the lithic artifacts are summarized as follows: 1) stone artifacts were made of local raw materials of cobbles/pebbles which derived from the riverbank alluvial deposits of the Hanjiang River, among them are mainly quartz and igneous rock, although quartzite, fine sandstone and flint are also occasionally used; 2) the principal flake knapping method is direct hammer hard percussion, along with bi-polar technique; 3) most of the stone artifacts are small (<50mm) in size, large-sized retouched tools such as hand-axes and choppers are absent at this locality; 4) The retouched tools are mainly light-duty scrapers, points and burins also exist. Most removal positions of retouched tools are direct and inverse. Stratigraphic comparison and magnetostratigraphic analyses indicate that the age of the site is about 1.2~0.7 Ma.

Key words: Hanzhong Basin; Locality 3 of Longgangsi site; Stone artifacts; Fourth terrace; Early-middle Pleistocene