The 1973 excavation revealed the foundations of some 40 Neolithic houses, along with stone tools, pottery, jade ornaments, bone implements, wood carvings, and refined coal. A second excavation in 1978 produced an even more remarkable find: a wooden carving approximately 7,200 years old, believed to be a totem worshipped by the clan that inhabited the settlement. No other artifact found anywhere in the Shenyang region is older. The carving is among the earliest surviving examples of wooden sculpture found anywhere in the world, preserved by the particular conditions of Manchuria's cold, dense soils that slowed the decomposition that would have destroyed such objects in warmer climates.

The naming convention tells its own story about how archaeology works in rapidly industrializing societies. The ancient settlement was found in the grounds of a workers' dormitory called the Xinle Dormitory, so the find was christened the Xinle Relic. When subsequent research revealed that this was not merely a local curiosity but a previously unknown culture spanning the lower Liao River basin and the Liaodong Peninsula, the entire civilization inherited the dormitory's name. Later discoveries in nearby Xinmin proved equally significant, but by then the Xinle designation had become established in academic literature. The culture that cultivated millet seven millennia before the factory was built would forever be named after the building that replaced it.

In 1984, the Museum of the Xinle Civilization opened on the 44-acre archaeological site. The museum is split into two sections. The southern half displays artifacts recovered from the various excavations: the stone tools, pottery fragments, jade pieces, and the famous wooden carvings that connect this place to the deep Neolithic past of northeast Asia. The northern section offers something more ambitious: a reconstruction of a 7,000-year-old Xinle village, complete with representations of daily life inside the semi-subterranean houses that were typical of the culture. Visitors can walk through dwellings modeled on the archaeological evidence and see how the Xinle people cooked, stored food, and organized their domestic spaces.

The Xinle culture did not exist in isolation. It was one thread in a web of Neolithic societies that populated northeast China during the sixth and fifth millennia BC. The earlier Xinglongwa culture (6200-5400 BC) laid groundwork in the Liao River basin. The roughly contemporary Zhaobaogou culture developed nearby. And the later Hongshan culture (4700-2900 BC) would produce the region's most famous archaeological treasures, including elaborate jade dragons and the Goddess Temple at Niuheliang. The Xinle culture sits in the middle of this sequence, evidence that the Liao River corridor was a cradle of human civilization for thousands of years before the dynasties that would claim this land as their own.