China News Service, Beijing, January 17 Title: From hand shovels to satellites, how does Liangzhu archaeology reflect archaeological changes?
China News Weekly reporter Ni Wei
A Luoyang shovel, with a diameter of a few centimeters to more than ten centimeters, can be inserted into the ground several meters deep at a time. A remote sensing satellite that flies between 200 kilometers and 36,000 kilometers of space and can photograph half the earth at a time. Now, both are used in archaeology.
Modern archaeology has been in China for a hundred years, and archaeological technology is not the same as that of a hundred years ago. Relying on Luoyang shovels and hand shovels to dig up underground treasures is in line with people's traditional impression of archaeology, but it is far from the whole of contemporary archaeology. Nowadays, archaeologists often use satellites, drones, etc. to determine the location of the shovel before the field exploration.
The Liangzhu Ruins in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, were selected as World Cultural Heritage Sites in 2019. The Liangzhu culture was active between 5300 and 4300 years ago, and is considered to be the earliest state form in East Asia, which has confirmed 5,000 years of Chinese civilization. Several major discoveries in Liangzhu archaeology are quite dramatic, and the technical iterations on the Liangzhu construction site also reflect the changes in archaeology.
Fishing Liangzhu culture at the bottom of the pond
In the Liangzhu Museum, there is a mottled archaeological report on display, the cover is light yellow, there are faint dark stains, and there are two big characters on the top: Liangzhu and its signature: Shi Xingen. This archaeological report was published in 1938 in the fires of the Anti-Japanese War and was the first record of the Liangzhu site.
The first generation of excavators at the Liangzhu site was almost only Shi Xingeng. He was only 25 years old when he first discovered the Liangzhu site. In 1936, he worked as a geological and mineral assistant at the West Lake Museum, participating in the excavation of the Gudang site in Hangzhou organized by the museum. There were several stone axes with holes that made him feel familiar, and it seemed that they had also appeared in his hometown of Liangzhu.
Inspired, Shi Xin returned to his hometown and investigated alone. He recorded that crucial moment: At 2 p.m. on November 3, 1936, passing a pond that had been dried up by irrigation pumping, he "stumbled upon one or two pieces of black glossy pottery."
From December of that year to March 1937, with the support of the West Lake Museum, Shi Xin presided over three excavations, unearthing a large number of stone tools, pottery and jade. At that time, on the eve of the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, the excavation work was hastily completed, and only 12 site sites were vaguely marked, such as "Chessboard Tomb", "Mao'an Front" and "Before and After Gou Mountain".
In July 2019, in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, tourists stopped in front of the ruins of the Southern City Wall in liangzhu ancient city ruins park. Photo by China News Service reporter Wang Gang
On August 14, 1937, Hangzhou suffered an air raid. Three months later the Japanese landed on the north shore of Hangzhou Bay. At the end of that year, hangzhou fell, and various institutions were forced to relocate, and the director of the West Lake Museum recommended Shi Xin to Ruian County as a secretary in the Anti-Japanese Self-Defense Force. Shi Xin was more determined to make the discovery of his hometown public, and he copied the archaeological report of Chengziya in Shandong Province and wrote "Liangzhu" in a similar way. "I would like to commemorate my hometown with this book," he wrote at the beginning of the volume.
According to the limited latest archaeological dynamics, Shi Xin found that the black pottery of Liangzhu is similar to the black pottery excavated from the Chengziya of Longshan a few years ago.
At that time, Chinese archaeology only started for a dozen years, and the revolutionary technology "Carbon Fourteen", which can directly detect the age, will wait another 30 years before it is introduced to China. To determine the age of cultural relics, only two traditional ways of stratigraphy and artifact typology, that is, through the depth of the buried strata and the characteristics of the artifacts, the newly excavated artifacts are compared with the discovered cultural relics, and the early and who is late are judged, and the age is roughly located.
In 1939, at the age of 28, Shi Xin died of scarlet fever complicated by peritonitis. The initiator did not know to his death what the site he had excavated meant.
Later, Xia Nai named the "Liangzhu culture", making it write into the history of civilization as an independent culture in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River. Su Bingqi creatively divided the land of China into six major fauna, and put forward the theory of the independent origin and development of each fauna, because of the existence of Liangzhu culture, the southeast centered around Taihu Lake became one of the six major fauna.
In May 2020, in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, the jade components in the Liangzhu Museum attracted people to stop. China News Service reporter Zhang Yin photographed
Bamboo stick peeled out the amazing "king's tomb"
The Liangzhu ruins fell silent as soon as they appeared. In the spring of 1963, Mou Yongkang, a representative figure of the second generation of archaeologists in Liangzhu, came to Anxi Sujia Village near Liangzhu to conduct small-scale excavations, and found only pottery pieces and half a jade Qun. After that, the excavations stalled again.
After the reform and opening up, the archaeological work was fully restored, and the Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology was established, and due to Shi Xingen's "Liangzhu" report, the institute took the Liangzhu site as one of the priorities of its work. In 1981, Liangzhu Archaeology was restarted, presided over by Wang Mingda, who graduated from Peking University with a major in archaeology.
On the afternoon of May 31, 1986, on the slope of a hill called Anti-Mountain at the Liangzhu site, archaeologist Chen Yueyue cleared a piece of soil from the exploration square, sticking small jade grains and patent leather. He carefully held it in front of the leader Wang Mingda, who bent down and only glanced at it, and immediately jumped into the pit from the 1.6-meter-high partition beam, crouched down where the excavated pieces were excavated, and observed for a full quarter of an hour.
Wang Mingda pressed the excitement, did not dare to use his hand shovel, folded a piece of bamboo from the soil basket containing the soil, carefully removed a small piece of soil, and exposed the patent leather and a lot of small jade grains, and did not dare to start again. It was getting dark, and they quietly covered it with nylon film and covered it with dirt. At this time, the rain began to fall, and they covered the entire tomb and ran back to their residence in the heavy rain. This night, they drank a drink excitedly, did not feel at ease before going to bed, and braved the rain to make a circle.
Subsequently, anti-mountain high-grade tombs were gradually stripped from the five-thousand-year-old soil layer. At that time, the technology was very primitive, and there was almost no modern equipment in the entire archaeological site. The jade artifacts of the Anti-Mountain Tomb are amazing, almost full of them on the bottom of the tomb, and there is no place to put down. Archaeologists original "soil method", put two large moso bamboo on the pit mouth, hanging four ropes down, the lower end of the rope is also tied with two moso bamboo, moso bamboo on the wooden board, just like the chain bridge, people crouch or lie on the wooden board, down to clean. This excavation has a new understanding of the original position, compatibility relationship, and combination of jade in the tomb, so liangzhu jade has expanded from a single piece of research to the study of assembled parts, embellished beads, and inlays, which is of breakthrough significance.
Looking across the country, the 1980s were a period when prehistoric archaeology was in full bloom. The Discoveries of the Niuheliang Ruins in Liaoning, the Lingjiatan Ruins in Ma'anshan in Anhui, and the Sanxingdui Sites in Sichuan, along with the progress of the Liangzhu Sites, have spurred a heated discussion about the history of civilization over the past 5,000 years.
A year before the excavation of the Anti-Mountain Tomb, Liu Bin graduated from Jilin University majoring in archaeology and was assigned to Zhejiang, where he will become the leader of the third generation of archaeologists in Liangzhu.
"Starting from the anti-mountain, Liangzhu archaeology 'opened the hanging'." Wang Ningyuan, a researcher at the Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and a third-generation archaeologist in Liangzhu, said. In the following 30 years, Liangzhu brought more surprises: in 1987, the Yaoshan altar and noble cemetery were discovered; from 1992 to 1993, the Mojiaoshan Palace was excavated; from 2006 to 2007, the ancient city wall was discovered, which was listed as the three milestones of Liangzhu archaeology along with the first discovery of the Liangzhu site and the excavation of the anti-mountain tomb.
In October 2021, in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, tourists visited Liangzhu Yaoshan Ruins Park. The site is an important part of the ruins of Liangzhu Ancient City, and is an important altar tomb complex site in the early Liangzhu culture. (Drone photo) China News Service reporter Wang Gang photographed
Satellite image opens the "sky eye"
In 2007, the liangzhu ancient city wall of about 1700 meters from east to west and about 1900 meters from north to south was all found, with a total area of about 3 million square meters, and the overall appearance of Liangzhu ancient city was unveiled.
Liu Bin imagined: According to the traditional Chinese structure of the outer Guo inner city, will Liangzhu also have the outer Guo? Outer Guo is grander than the inner city, and it is too difficult to rely on the Luoyang shovel to explore.
As an attempt, the Institute of Archaeology used GIS (Geographic Information System) software for the first time to make a digital elevation model (DEM) of the site area, and made a surprising discovery: the ruins of the MojiaoShan Palace, which have been excavated for so many years, and the three high platforms of the large and small Mojiao Mountain and the Turtle Mountain, are clearly visible in the model. Looking further outside the city, a rectangular structure appears on the outside of the southeast of the ancient city, with three sides of the north, east and south, surrounding the city wall. Then the archaeological work on the wall was quickly carried out, and Guo found it outside the ancient city.
The so-called "digital elevation model", in layman's terms, is to paint objects of the same height on the map with the same color. In this way, even if a wall is broken into scattered small sections, because the basic height is the same, it is displayed as the same color on the map, so the vein of the wall can be clearly seen.
In October 2020, in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, tourists visited the Mojiaoshan Palace in liangzhu Ancient City Ruins Park. Photo by China News Service reporter Wang Gang
High-tech exploration of the rise and fall of ancient cities
In the Geological Archaeology Laboratory of the Liangzhu Site Archaeology and Conservation Center, the cabinet contains almost all stone samples collected from a nearby mountain. After the discovery of the walls of the ancient city in 2007, archaeologists took these samples, hoping to find out where people quarried the stones, how long they took, and how they were transported.
Ji Xiang, the fourth generation archaeologist of Liangzhu after the "80s", is a geological archaeology expert, and participated in the geological archaeology project of the Liangzhu site when he was a master's student.
"This is to study the living and production mode and social outlook of Liangzhu Ancient City, and to get a general understanding of the exchanges between various regions at that time." Ji Xiang explained the use of the stone sample in this way. They concluded that the cushion stones were calculated according to the texture and morphology of the city wall cushions, when the city wall cushions were transported by bamboo rafts, and the possible transportation routes were restored according to the river channel and the location of the quarry point.
"In the past, it could only be seen with the naked eye, and it was probably judged where it came from, but now under the infrared and fluorescence detection equipment, it is possible to analyze the chemical elements and mineral structures of stone, jade and soil, and compare them in detail." Ji Xiang said that the farthest rock mine found so far is about 100 kilometers away from the ancient city.
The Liangzhu Site Archaeology and Conservation Center has set up a number of scientific and technological laboratories, and has also cooperated with many universities in China to restore the high-precision hydrology, landform and climatic environment at key points in time such as 7000 years, 5500 years, 4200 years and 3800 years.
These studies provide clues to the rise and fall of liangzhu ancient city: about 4200 years ago, the Yuhang Basin in Hangzhou suffered a continuous flood, and the ancient city of Liangzhu disappeared from sight until 2000 years later, during the Warring States period, when humans came back to live here.
"Now there are more technical means, the old man used to put the frame up, and now we are filling the frame with details." Ji Xiang said. (End)