Wuhan Huangpi Panlong city site archaeology has made significant progress, January 7 learned that the scientific and technological archaeology team with the help of geographic information technology and other means, lasted 5 years to collect data, two years of processing, simulation, for the first time to restore the overall topography of the Shang Dynasty Panlong City settlement, intuitively revealed the Panlong City ruins area of the current lake, in the Xia Shang period should be a land contiguous land. This important achievement was published online by the international academic journal Remote Sensing (SCI).
According to reports, since the site of Panlong City was discovered in 1954, it has undergone many rounds of archaeological work, and found important relics such as city walls, trenches, palace base sites, tombs of high-ranking nobles, and copper handicraft workshops. In recent years, the School of History of Wuhan University, which participated in the archaeology of the Panlong City ruins, cooperated with the School of Remote Sensing information Engineering of Wuhan University and the Institute of Geography and Limnology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to carry out underwater topographic mapping, archaeological exploration and test excavation of Panlong Lake and Broken Mouth Lake in the Panlong City ruins area.
Dr. Zou Qiushi, who is in charge of the environmental archaeology work of the Panlong City site, introduced that the archaeological team drained the water of the lake and carried out underwater archaeological excavations, and found that there were a large number of Shang cultural relics at the bottom of the lake. Among them, the pottery mane excavated is similar in shape to the artifacts excavated in the cast copper workshop area of Xiaozuigangdi at the site of Panlong City. At the same time, a more accurate C14 dating of the drill samples at the bottom of the lake showed that its age was in the early and middle Shang Dynasty, which was basically the same as the formation time of the Panlong City Wall.
Underwater archaeological exploration work scene (courtesy of the interviewee)
He also introduced that according to the topographic surveying and mapping data of the lake, combined with the distribution of sites and tombs, it is believed that the water level in the contemporary Panlong Lake area is 5 to 7 meters higher than that of the Xia and Shang dynasties. In view of the fact that Panlong Lake and Broken Mouth Lake were in a state of natural connectivity before the 1970s, the research team analyzed that the large lake beaches that were flooded by the current Panlong City ruins should have been connected land during the Xia And Shang periods. According to this speculation, the land area of the Panlongcheng settlement in the Shang Dynasty may reach 3.24 square kilometers, which is nearly double the land area of the current site of 1.74 square kilometers. In addition, panlong city underwater archaeology also found that there is a hard clay layer at the bottom of the lake, similar to the swamp soil in the southern rice fields, and it is initially speculated that the bottom of the lake may be distributed in the "rice cultivation area" of Panlong City at that time.
Panlong Lake underwater topographic map, dark blue for Shang Dynasty waters, light blue for modern waters (courtesy of interviewee)
Zou Qiushi believes that the results of scientific and technological archaeology not only confirm that the landform of the Panlong City site has experienced great changes since the Shang Dynasty to the present, but also has great significance for re-understanding the layout of the Panlong City settlement and the scale of the city.
"Panlong City is the largest central city site in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River during the Xia and Shang Dynasties, and it is also the most representative settlement of the early bronze civilization in the Yangtze River Basin." Zhang Changping, the leader of the archaeological excavation team of the Panlong City site and a professor at Wuhan University, said that the main body of the ancestors of Panlong City should be the residents of the Central Dynasty ruling the southern soil, and the new research results show that Panlong City at that time was a city with a considerable scale and complex functional partitions from the perspective of environmental archaeology, which further confirmed the status of Panlong City as the central city in the south at that time.
Transferred from: Hubei Daily
Source: Jingchu Network