The Banpo Museum is located in a modern building some three miles to the east of Xi'an City in Shaanxi Province. it is the first museum built for a 'mankind site,' a habitation site of early man. Its name comes from its location on the northern side of Banpo Village. The site marks a settlement that dates to the matrilineal clan commune period of the Neolithic period. Before its discovery in the twentieth century, it had been lying in wait for some 6,000 years.

The approximately 4,500 square meters (about 1 acre) exhibit area of Banpo Museum is divided into two Exhibition Halls and a Site Hall.

The first Exhibition Hall is about the unearthed relic exhibitions。The showpieces in the hall are primarily production tools and domestic tools used by the primitive Banpo people, including axes, bones chisels, sickles, and stone and pottery knives. Those tools are made by the technique of grinding and polishing and were comparatively smooth.

Carved and painted signs: Around twelve different kinds of markings or symbols have been found on pottery fragments or on vessels at the site. Together they comprise the main types of strokes used in Chinese characters, such as upright, cross-wise, hooked, and so on. Writing did not exist at the time, but these marks or symbols almost certainly contained their own meanings for people at the time.

Tip-bottomed bottle: It is characteristic of the pottery unearthed at Banpo. It had two advantages for holding water. The first is that it was portable and easy to carry on the back. The second is that the water would not spill out when it was carried from the river to the living place.

Human-faced Fish Design: It was a masterpiece painting discovered on the site. On its head the hair was well pinned and one into a knot, two small fish were held in the corners of its mouth. This design depicts Banpo people's strong ties and special emotion with fish. It was most likely the totem of the Banpo people.

The Use of Pottery Steamers: Banpo people already found that steam could be used in cooking, and then they invented pottery steamers. This has been proven to be the earliest use of steam in human history.

The second Exhibition Hall is primarily used for auxiliary exhibitions and it contains two halls. Special shows are held here on ethnology, folklore and the history of art related to the prehistoric culture.

The Site Hall is about 3,000 square meters (about 0.7 acre) and contains residential, burial and pottery making section. And among the three, the residential section is the main part of the site.

The residential section: The arrangement of the Neolithic village was quite organized. At the center of the settlement was a 160-square meter-large room that was surrounded by many smaller rooms. All of the doors of these faced the inside larger room, reflecting the clan spirit of a cohesive group. Around the village was a 300-meter long trench or ditch that was used to keep wild animals from attacking. Inside the town were some 46 houses. Some were square, some round, and some half-submerged in the ground, some on the surface. These houses already used traditional Chinese wall-construction methods and can be called precursors of later Chinese architecture that used wood and earth.

Burial section: It was the place where adults were buried. Some 174 graves have been discovered, lined up in regular order, but exhibiting different burial customs. At that time, males and females were separately buried either in groups or singly and there was not a grave where a man and a woman were buried together. This is precisely an indication of a characteristic matriarchal society when exogamy was practiced.

To bury dead children in jars is a burial custom of the Banpo people. When children died, they were not supposed to be buried in the communal cemetery of the village. So far 73 burial jars were found.

Pottery making section: On the eastern side of the site is the Public Kiln for firing pottery. Six kilns have been found to date. By the time of Banpo, people had invented two main types of horizontal and upright kilns. Banpo ceramic production used both fine-grained clay and sandy coarse clay; the fine-grained was of three types depending on its use. Banpo people used realistic methods of painting to decorate their ceramics, with sketched designs to exhibit the characteristics of various animals.