With the unveiling of major new archaeological discoveries at the Sanxingdui site in Guanghan, Sichuan on March 20, 2021, reports on sanxingdui's "Shangxin" frequently appeared on hot searches in 2021, becoming a veritable "net red" in the archaeological community. As one of the most important archaeological discoveries of mankind in the 20th century, 6 new Sanxingdui cultural "sacrifice pits" have been discovered at the Sanxingdui site, and more than 500 important cultural relics have been excavated, including the largest complete gold mask so far, three bronze kneeling portraits with never seen before, bronze altars called national treasures, bronze small standing people who resemble Ultraman, bronze heads with hair combed into tiles, imaginative bronze divine beasts, sharp jade "Western food knives", jade quintessents engraved with divine tree patterns, and so on.
The newly unearthed complete gold mask at the Sanxingdui site
In archaeology, behind every shiny new discovery, there are protracted and trivial efforts of generations of archaeologists. Since the first archaeological excavations in 1934, a total of 37 excavations have been carried out at the Sanxingdui site. The excavation area is less than 20,000 square meters, while the total distribution area of the Sanxingdui site is 12 square kilometers. At present, the excavation area accounts for only two thousandths of the total area! There is no doubt that in the second hundred years of Chinese archaeology, Sanxingdui will be an important site.
The 2021 Sanxingdui Archaeology Live Broadcast has narrowed the distance between the public and national treasures
If there is anything different from the archaeological excavations and research of Sanxingdui in the 21st century, the first is that science and technology help archaeology. In the process of excavation, archaeologists made full use of modern scientific and technological means to build archaeological excavation cabins, integrated excavation platforms, multi-functional excavation operating systems, and equipped with on-site emergency protection and analysis and testing equipment, which provided an effective guarantee for archaeological information collection and cultural relics safety protection. In addition, archaeologists have also built an information platform for the archaeological excavation, and comprehensively recorded and scientifically managed the cultural relics data, image data, and environmental monitoring data in the archaeological work. Secondly, more and more archaeologists outside Sichuan are involved, and the international color of Sanxingdui is becoming more and more obvious and strong.
At the site of the 2021 Sanxingdui site, imaginative bronze mythical beasts were unearthed
Professor Xu Jian, head of the Department of History of Shanghai University, who is responsible for the excavation of the No. 3 pit of the Sanxingdui site, said in an exclusive interview with Nandu reporters that from the perspective of the relics unearthed so far, and even the overall cultural appearance of the site, in global archaeology, Sanxingdui is not lost to any other site or culture. Sanxingdui deserves a place in the types and characteristics of early civilizations, in the theories and methods of global archaeology. (Zhou Peiwen)