Since April 2021, the Tianjin Municipal Cultural Heritage Protection Center has carried out archaeological excavations at the site of Junliangcheng in Dongli District, Tianjin, and found a large Rammed earth platform with an area of 60,000 square meters and a Tang Dynasty salt workshop area. This excavation is the first time in nearly 70 years that the Tianjin area has found sites with such a large area and the main body piled up in the Tang Dynasty. According to archaeological findings, the area where the ruins of Junliang City are located is the best choice for discussing the documentation of the "Sanhui Haikou" in the Tang Dynasty, which is of great significance for the transformation of tianjin's ancient port and the study of the relationship between ancient people and land in Tianjin.
Aerial panorama of the ruins of the Military Grain City.
The ruins of Junliangcheng are located on the north side of the first phase of Junliangcheng Demonstration Town in Dongli District, Tianjin (southwest of the former Liutai Village), and were discovered in the archaeological exploration of infrastructure construction of the land consolidation project in Dongli District.
According to reports, the site has cleared out more than 200 relics such as ash pits, ash ditches, stoves, wells, kilns, and ruts, and unearthed a large number of specimens of Tang Dynasty artifacts with obvious characteristics of the times, mainly including pottery pots, clay pots, green glazed bowls (cups), white glazed bowls (cups), black glazed bowls (cups), sancai pots and other living utensils, plate tiles, barrel tiles, lotus pattern tiles, and a large number of small square bricks and thick rope pattern bricks and other building components, in addition to the excavation of copper coins (mainly Kaiyuan Tongbao), copper armor pieces, animal bones and other specimens.
Gan Caichao, project leader and deputy research librarian of Tianjin Cultural Heritage Protection Center, introduced that this excavation is the first time in nearly 70 years that such a large area and the main body is piled up as a Tang Dynasty site in Tianjin. In all trenches within 60,000 square meters of the fourth excavation area and 0.9 million square meters in the third excavation area, the remains of rammed earth platform foundations about 1 meter high were found. "Combined with the Tang Dynasty tombs of Baishaling, Liu Taipei, southwest Sakai, tang dynasty tombs found in the area of Junliangcheng from the 1950s to the 1980s, these sites and tombs are centered on the large rammed earth platform foundations discovered by this archaeological discovery, and are distributed around them, which together constitute a large settlement system with a higher tang dynasty rank in the southern region of Tianjin."
Gan Caichao said that the discovery provides a possibility for exploring the Tang Dynasty Haikou in the Tianjin area. The central position and building volume of the large-scale Tang Dynasty rammed earth platform planning site of the military grain city fully reflect that this is a systematic and super-large-scale artificial construction activity carried out due to special needs under the management of the tang dynasty's extremely strong political (or military) organization. According to archaeological findings, the area where the ruins of Junliang City are located is the best choice for discussing the Tang Dynasty "Sanhui Haikou" recorded in the literature, which is of great significance for the transformation of Tianjin's ancient port and the study of the relationship between ancient people and land in Tianjin.
What is even more rare is that in the third excavation area of the ruins of Junliang City, the remains of brine wells, ash pits, salt stoves, beach yards, ash ditches and other relics have been found, which should be directly related to the salt making processes such as brine extraction, brine making, frying brine and drying, forming a relatively complete Tang Dynasty salt workshop area. Gan Caichao said that this is the first time that Tianjin archaeology has found the remains of ancient salt production, filling the archaeological gap in Tianjin's salt industry.
It is understood that in the past, the salt-making sites of the same period have archaeological discoveries in the coastal areas of Hebei and Shandong south of Tianjin, and the discovery of the remains of Tang Dynasty salt-making at the site of Tianjin Junliangcheng provides the latest and important physical data for the systematic study and understanding of the development history of the ancient salt industry in northern China and the west coast of bohai Bay, and also provides important archaeological support for interpreting and interpreting the thick salt culture history of Tianjin.
The excavation also unearthed specimens of very rich types and quantities, which provided accurate criteria for the tang dynasty relics in Tianjin and improved the current situation of few relics of the Tang Dynasty in Tianjin, which is of great significance.
"The Tang Dynasty cultural relics discovered at the junliangcheng site this time are the first time in the nearly 70 years since the birth of Tianjin archaeology that they have been discovered through scientific and systematic archaeological excavations, and the scale of the site is large, and the relics are rich, enriching the connotation of Tianjin's history and activating the historical scene of Tianjin in the Tang Dynasty." Gan Caichao introduced that the Tianjin Municipal Cultural Heritage Protection Center will start the analysis, testing and collation of excavation data as soon as possible, and will continue to explore and study the results of archaeological excavations at this site, and promote the archaeological research of the salt industry in the west coast of the Bohai Bay, the change of the ancient port of Tianjin and the origin of Tianjin city.
(Beijing Daily client)