Ma and his team began the excavation in 2006, and the excavation area reached 12,000 square meters. Ma told reporters that to the surprise of archaeologists, the cultural relic protection work carried out to cooperate with an important water project of China, called South-to-North Water Diversion, brought about a big archaeological outcome.

The water diversion project is an important construction that the Chinese Government carried out to relieve the water shortage of the northern area of the country. According to the project, part of the water of the Yangtze River in the south will be transferred to the northwestern and northern areas of the country. The project will be carried out along three routes. The middle line was completed in 2007 and the eastern line is planned to be finished in 2010. According to the primary statistics, the project might unearth more than 700 historical sites. To protect and rescue the cultural relics related with these sites, Chinese archaeologists have been busy in discovering and conserving these relics.

SACH's Tong said that the infrastructure construction is sometimes in contradiction to cultural relic protection, and so how to well conserve the cultural heritage while modernizing the country poses a major task for archaeologists.

In the past, he added, people paid less attention to this problem, and so some cultural heritages have been devastated, and some even disappeared. But in recent years, with enhanced awareness of cultural relic protection by the public and also the government, cultural heritage protection has been a big concern of the Central Government in relation to modernization.

Taking the Three Gorges Project for example, Tong said that before the construction, archaeologists did careful investigation and research. Almost all experts in cultural relic protection were assembled to the areas along the Three Gorges Project construction line, trying their best to rescue the cultural relics there.

As for the South-to-North Water Diversion, archaeologists reaped much during the archaeological investigation before the start of the construction. The construction area covers the hinterland of the Chinese civilization, such as Henan, Hubei and Shandong provinces, a region where past civilizations once prospered.