The picture shows a large workshop excavated at the Huangshan site in Nanyang in the late Yangshao culture.
The M1902 tomb at the Liulihe site unearthed an inscription of a bronze skull.
A bronze kneeling figure unearthed from Pit 4 of the Sanxingdui site.
The picture shows the stone standing owl excavated from the M1001 tomb of the Yin Ruins Shang King Mausoleum.
The picture shows the blue-gray "concrete" floor excavated from the site of Yangshao Village.
The picture shows the bronze mask excavated from the M1901 tomb at the Liulihe site.
The picture shows half a gold mask excavated from Pit 5 of the Sanxingdui site.
2021 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of modern Chinese archaeology. General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out: "In the past 100 years, generations of archaeologists have made unremitting efforts to make a series of major archaeological discoveries. "This year, the new discoveries and new results of many important sites have also attracted the public's attention again and again. We came to these archaeological sites and asked archaeologists to tell the latest progress of excavations, the latest research on excavated cultural relics, and share their experiences and insights.
- Editor
Refresh the understanding of the pattern of the Shang Dynasty Tomb Area
Niu Shishan (Anyang Workstation, Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)
Yin Ruins
"A history of the excavation of yin ruins, half of the history of Chinese archaeology".
For more than 90 years, from the beginning simply to protect the relics of the Yin Ruins oracle bones from being excavated and stolen, to now "Yin Ruins Studies" has become a comprehensive research field including oracle bone science, Shang culture and Shang Dynasty, urban planning and construction, population and society, handicraft technology and technology, resource utilization, art history, etc.
In 2021, we will set our sights on the Shangwang Mausoleum, hoping to find out the scope of the Shangwangling District by exploring and finding the main road between the Xiaotun Palace District and the Wangling District, so as to study the functional zoning of the area on the north bank of the Huan River.
Archaeological work in and around the Shang King's Mausoleum began very early. From the autumn of 1934 to the autumn of 1935, Mr. Liang Siyong presided over the 10th to 12th excavation of Yin Ruins, excavating 10 Yin Shang tombs with tomb passages, 1 unfinished large tomb and more than 1,000 small tombs in Northwest Gang. The scale of the tomb is grand, the burial relics are exquisite, and the location of the Shang King's Mausoleum is determined from this, which is of great significance in the study of yin ruins archaeology and Ancient Chinese history. In the 1950s and 1980s, through drilling, archaeologists roughly confirmed the scope of the Wangling Area, and later built the Wangling Ruins Park on this basis. Since then, the relevant archaeological work has not been further carried out. Until August 2021, we looked for the Shang Dynasty trunk road around the heritage park, and once again opened the "look" of the Wangling district.
The area around the Wangling Ruins Park is mainly apple orchards, due to the age of the trees more than 25 years, the trees have been degraded, but in the Yin Ruins Key Conservation Area, deep-rooted plants cannot be planted, and new plants cannot be replaced, and the orchards are mostly deserted. When we offered to enter the exploration, the contractor readily agreed.
Everyone spent several days cleaning up the weeds, typing the measurement and control points, and then began to pull the line to explore the square. First, with a spacing of 2 meters, the hole is probed to the north. Within a week, three human bone pits were found in an area of 40 meters from east to west and 60 meters from north to south outside the east wall of the park. We suspected that the spacing between the probe holes was too large, and there might be omissions, so we changed it to a 1 meter spacing to make up for it, and sure enough, more sacrificial pits were probing in the same area. Subsequently, we poked out the ditch 80 meters east of the east wall. In the western section of the East Wai Ditch and then drilled west, sure enough, a north-south ditch was found, the width was similar to that of the East Wai Ditch, and the soil filled in the ditch was almost exactly the same as the soil layer layer in the East Wai Ditch, the soil color and soil quality were almost exactly the same, according to which it can be speculated that there is also a complete enclosure ditch in the western part of the Wangling District.
Combining the results of this exploration with several previous archaeological maps, it can be seen that there are two ditches in the eastern and western parts of the Shang Dynasty Mausoleum Area, and the tombs of the Shang Dynasty found in the past are distributed in the two ditches. The number of sacrificial pits (a few of which may be funerary tombs) at the rectangular mouth is large, almost all in the East Wai Ditch, and the animal pits at the square mouth are distributed in the area east of the southeast corner of the West Wai Ditch and south of the East Wai Ditch. In the area between the east wall of the park and the east wall ditch, more than 400 new sacrificial pits have been excavated, and a small number of tombs are densely distributed, and the remains are rare outside the ditch east.
The newly discovered ditches and dense sacrificial pits in this archaeological exploration make us rethink the pattern and function of the Shang King's Tomb Area, and once again illustrate the importance of continuous archaeological work in Yin Ruins. Although archaeology is often said to be a "science of discovery", research with questions is the most important. The progress of this work will also promote the study of the tomb system of the Shang Kings.
Four archaeological excavations uncover three thousand years of time
Wei Xingtao (Henan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology)
Yangshao Village
In 1921, the excavation of the site of Yangshao Village in Henan Province marked the birth of modern Chinese archaeology, and discovered and named China's first archaeological culture, Yangshao culture, thus beginning the century-long process of Yangshao culture research.
In 1951, the second archaeology led by archaeologist Xia Nai clarified the nature and appearance of the culture. The third excavation in 1980-1981 confirmed the existence of two archaeological cultures, Yangshao and Longshan in Yangshao Village. Every archaeology has a new harvest.
In 2021, the Yangshao village site underwent the fourth archaeological excavation in history.
Although the fourth archaeological excavation area of the Yangshao Village site is only 200 square meters, archaeologists have once again found rich relics such as house sites, trenches, tombs, cellars, ash pits, ash ditches, roads, pillar holes, etc., and unearthed a large number of relics such as pottery, jade, stone tools, bone tools, ivory products and so on. Through dating, we know that the remains seen include the early, middle and late Yangshao culture, as well as the Miaodigou II culture and the Longshan culture period.
That is, the site has been in use for 3,000 years.
The discovery of large artificial trenches reflects the complete defense facilities of the Yangshao village site, the large population of the settlement, and the prosperity of development. Archaeologists have found for the first time the remains of house buildings such as blue-gray "concrete" floors and reddish-brown painted vermilion stem mud walls, which provide new materials for studying the types, shapes and construction techniques of houses in Yangshao Village and the Yangshao culture period in western Henan. Silk residue information was detected in human bone soil samples from the late Yangshao and Longshan periods, and there were earlier grain fermentation wines in the residues of pointed bottom bottles in the Yangshao period. It can be seen that the people of Yangshao Village at that time may have lived a life of wearing silk and drinking fine wine.
Yangshao culture is the most widely distributed archaeological culture in China, involving 10 provinces, lasting for more than 2,000 years, in its vast distribution area can be divided into different "types", is a huge cultural jungle or cultural system, the connotation is extremely rich. In recent years, henan province, under the framework of projects such as the "Archaeological China" Central Plains Civilization Process, has excavated a series of important Yangshao cultural sites such as Yangshao Village in Shichi, Shuanghuashu in Zhengzhou, Huangshan in Nanyang, Lingbao City Tobacco, Lingbao Beiyangping, and Suyang in Yiyang, which jointly promoted the in-depth understanding of Yangshao culture.
During the archaeological excavations at the Huangshan site from May 2018 to April 2021, hundreds of Yangshao culture tombs, sites, workshops, ash pits, etc. related to jade tool making were cleared out of an area of about 300,000 square meters. The abundant number of jade-making tools, jade material defects, pottery, bone ware and other relics illustrate the nature of the large-scale jade ware production "base" at the Huangshan site. This discovery fills the gap left by Neolithic jade workshops in the Central Plains and the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, and provides key materials for studying the formation of Chinese civilization.
Lingbao Beiyangping Ruins is the largest Yangshao cultural settlement site in the Zhudingyuan site group, with an existing area of 720,000 square meters. During the excavations from September 2020 to June 2021, three new large sites were discovered in the northern part of the site. Among them, the No. 2 site is well preserved, the structure is complex, the processing is exquisite, and its architectural form is semi-crypt type, sitting northeast and facing southwest. A large number of carbonized wood components are preserved in the site, including indoor center columns, pilasters, beam frames, etc., some similar to mortise and mortise structures, which are unique to the remains of Yangshao cultural architecture, which is of great significance for the restoration of the roof truss structure of prehistoric house buildings.
These archaeological discoveries and studies have shown that the Yangshao culture of various periods in various places once gave birth to a sparkling civilization.
The inscription empirically proves the history of the founding of Beijing
Shi Fang (reporter of this newspaper)
Glass River
The Liulihe River is the source of Beijing's urban development, representing more than 3,000 years of Beijing's history, and is also a proof of the system of dividing seals and the system of liturgical music in the Western Zhou Dynasty.
In 1974, a large number of exquisite cultural relics were unearthed at the site, including the Treasure of the Capital Museum and the Largest Bronze Quartz excavated in the Beijing area, and the veil of Beijing as the capital of the Yan Kingdom was lifted.
Due to the high groundwater level, the two tombs were not excavated completely. Since 2019, the excavation of the two large tombs has resumed, and the archaeology of the city site area and the tomb area has been carried out, a total of 5 tombs in the early Western Zhou Dynasty, 3 housing sites, and 1 suspected outer ring trench have been excavated, and more than 100 pieces of various cultural relics such as bronzeware, lacquerware, pottery, sea shells, ivory ware, and silk fabric specimens have been excavated.
At the end of 2021, with the release of a number of the latest archaeological results, the Liulihe site in Fangshan, Beijing has once again attracted the attention of the world.
In order to fill the gap of previous field excavations and study the coffin regulation of Western Zhou tombs, archaeologists for the first time used the "broken wall excavation method" of cleaning from outside the rafters to the inside, cleaning up the key phenomena and excavated artifacts 1/2, and leaving the key traces in the cross-section. A number of lacquerware and fabric overlap phenomena that have not been found in the past have been cleaned up, the wooden arrow rods and mat patterns of the bronze arrows of the Western Zhou Dynasty in Beijing have been identified for the first time, and the silk fabrics with ornaments in the early days of the Western Zhou Dynasty in Beijing have been successfully extracted for the first time, accurately restoring the spatial position of each excavated artifact, and providing rich materials for restoring the burial process and funeral system.
Cultural relics conservation professionals participate in the excavations throughout the process, and protect the relics of different materials according to local conditions. For organic cultural relics such as wooden poles, mat marks, cinnabar, fabrics, etc., temporary reinforcement treatment is carried out using menthol, etc., and lacquered wood is made of menthol, gypsum, polyurethane foaming agent, etc., combined with the rapid extraction of the overall box, and quickly placed in the laboratory for laboratory archaeology and protection restoration.
The tomb numbered M1901 has been excavated, and there are many new discoveries this time. The bronze masks, animal-shaped copper ornaments, groups of copper carriages and horses, and bronze bronzes on display at the archaeological site are exquisitely decorated and rich in detail. The structure and decoration of the hollow copper ge are influenced by many surrounding areas, the triangular blade is related to the Bashu region, the hollow ornament is related to the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, and the structure of the capped pipe is similar to that of weapons in the northern grasslands. The use of shield ornaments such as bronze masks and animal-faced bronze ornaments, including the image of a samurai holding a shield in one hand and a goe in the other, indicates that the identity of the owner of the tomb is by no means ordinary.
In the large tomb numbered M1903, a number of new lacquerware have been unearthed this time, and the identifiable ones are triangular grains, beans and so on. The discovery of lacquerware is of great significance for the study of the system of burial utensils.
Between M1901 and M1903, the newly discovered M1902 tomb unearthed the earliest tomb head box cover plate known to Beijing. Inside the box, there are copper beams, bronze zuns, bronze lords, copper dings, copper swords, lacquerware, pottery, etc., and the combination is rich. In particular, it is worth mentioning that a bronze inscription appears "Taibao", "Yongyan", "Yanhou Palace" and other contents, which proves that more than 3,000 years ago, the Zhou King Chongchen summoned his father to Yandu to build the city wall of the capital of Yanguo, which is now the ancient city of Dongjialin at the site of Liulihe. The inscription proves more than 3,000 years of Beijing's history of the founding of the city with indisputable written materials, which has a unique value in the study of world urban history.
This archaeology provides a lot of valuable information for understanding the Liturgical Music System, the Sub-sealing System, the Burial System and Burial Customs, and the Early City Site Planning of the Western Zhou Dynasty.
Six "blind boxes" remove important artifacts
Thunder Rain (Sanxingdui Site Workstation, Sichuan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology)
Samsung Pile
In 1986, the discovery of two sacrificial pits at the Sanxingdui site was a sensation. Sanxingdui vividly shows the uniqueness and creativity of the ancient Shu civilization and enriches the overall appearance of Chinese civilization.
Since March 2021, the archaeological work of Sanxingdui has attracted widespread attention and high praise from the society due to the "dismantling of 6 blind boxes in a row" in the sacrifice area and the domination of the screen, which can be described as "taking a nap for decades, and then waking up to shock the world".
Up to now, the cleaning and extraction of utensils in Pit 3 and Pit 4 has been completed and entered the indoor finishing stage. The overall plan for the interception of gold and ivory fragments at the bottom of pit 5 has been developed and will be carried out for cutting and extraction. Pit 6 wooden box has been taken back indoors in its entirety, ready for further cleaning and testing of the filler in the box. The ivory layers of Pit 7 and Pit 8 have been basically extracted, and a large area has begun to enter the copper and jade layers.
The distribution density of utensils in pits 7 and 8 is extremely high, especially in pit 8, and there is no way to get off the foot. Relying on non-contact excavation equipment, the crane can be moved, so that the clean-up work can be carried out normally. Excavators can only lie on or kneel on the crane to clean up and record, although the crane work is all post-90s boys, but the time will still be unbearable, so they have to change shifts every hour and take turns.
In this excavation, more than 10,000 pieces of gold, copper, jade, stone, agate, turquoise, pottery, ivory, ivory, sea shells and other types of artifacts have been excavated, and it is initially estimated that more than 2,000 complete or relatively complete artifacts after restoration have been excavated. Among the artifacts that have been extracted or exposed, there is no shortage of "star-level". For example, the bronze top statue of the kneeling figure in Pit No. 3, the portrait with curly hair (crown), the small standing man with a sharp hat, the giant man mask, the sacred tree pattern jade, the animal face pattern jade seat, the bronze head-turned-head kneeling figure in Pit No. 4, the large gold mask and bird-shaped gold ornament in Pit No. 5, the painted wooden box and jade knife in Pit No. 6, the bronze "turtle back manhole cover" in Pit No. 7, the bronze god beast in Pit No. 8, and the statue of the snake (yao-shaped) in pit No. 8. These artifacts are either strange in shape, complex in structure, exquisite in style, or large and eye-catching.
Take the bronze portrait of a kneeling figure with a twisted head, whose exaggerated hairstyle and special artifact function attract people's imagination. This kind of almost completely realistic portrait was first discovered even in Sanxingdui, which is known for its portraits.
The bronze top statue kneels and sits on the knee, and a typical Sanxingdui style portrait is almost perfectly integrated with a bronze ceremonial vessel of the Shang Dynasty common in the Central Plains and the Yangtze River Basin, the Dakou Zun. Dakouzun is neither the original Zhongyuan style nor the typical Yangtze River Basin style, but has been boldly reformed, in addition to adding short columns to the mouth of Dakouzun, but also very cleverly decorating the neck and shoulders of The two dragons. Such a large mouth, exquisite, the country only seen, the imagination and innovation of the ancient Shu people is really extraordinary.
The discovery of silk is also one of the biggest highlights of this excavation. Most of the ancient legends about sericulture are related to Shudi, and a large number of silk residues or imprints found in Sanxingdui confirm the long history of the silkworm silk weaving industry in the ancient Shu region.
In this excavation, new archaeological concepts, methods and modern scientific and technological means were used in large quantities. The excavation site was specially designed and built a fully enclosed, constant temperature and humidity, with fresh air system excavation cabin, the 6 new pits were all covered, and the excavators wore protective clothing throughout the whole process to work in the cabin, and tried to achieve sterile excavation. The multidisciplinary laboratory is equipped with a series of monitoring, testing and recording instruments to carry out on-site observation, analysis, information extraction and protection of excavated artifacts, realizing the seamless combination of archaeological excavation, multidisciplinary research and on-site protection.
Layout design: Zhao Kairu
People's Daily ( 2022-01-05 19th edition)