Ancient village as a precious historical and cultural heritage of China is hailed as the 'eco-museum' of classical folk cultures and 'living fossil' of rural history culture. This paper elaborated human settlement characteristics of ancient Dongyuan Zengs’ Village, Jinxi County from the perspectives of village environment, history evolution, village layout and village building, and explored the substantial content of village human settlement protection, and proposed specifi c approaches of protecting the human settlement, such as ancient village layout, history and culture, and provided references for protecting human settlement of the ancient villages.