Loess plateau
Guanzhong Plain is known as the eight hundred miles of Qinchuan, has always found many cultural heritage, cultural relics and monuments, its north is the famous Loess Plateau, and the loess high cause geographical location, natural environment and other factors, compared with the Guanzhong Plain there are not too many remarkable heavyweight archaeological discoveries. But there are still ancestors living here thousands of years ago, and an ordinary archaeological excavation, excavating an ordinary Western Zhou Period cemetery, but archaeologists have discovered a wonderful "magic", how did they do it?
First, the construction of high-speed, cemetery began to appear
Yaozhou District of Tongchuan City was called "Yaozhou" in ancient times, and the "Yaozhou Kiln" in the Five Dynasties Period was the only celadon kiln in the north. Today, it is also an important central city in the central region of Shaanxi, and many roads connecting northern Shaanxi and Guanzhong pass through here.
In 2012, the construction of the Tonghuang (Tongchuan to Huangling) Expressway flipped the originally calm land here, and the construction crew found a Western Zhou cemetery during the construction process.
The constantly turned over of broken pottery pieces and faintly recognizable pottery fragments made the builders curious. Soon, the staff of the Shaanxi Provincial Archaeological Research Institute and the Tongchuan Archaeological Research Institute entered and launched a rescue archaeological excavation here.
This Western Zhou cemetery is located in a natural village called Huolong Village in the east of Shizhu Town, Yaozhou District, Tongchuan City, Shaanxi Province. The name of The Living Dragon Village sounds very magical, the mountain north of the village is called Wenwang Mountain, according to legend, King Wen of Zhou once landed here, and there is an old tree in the middle of the mountain, which is said to have a history of thousands of years.
Listening to the word-of-mouth legends, the villagers did not know that there was indeed a group of tombs at their feet from the time of King Wen of Zhou, about 3,000 years ago.
Schematic map of the location of the cemetery in Huolong Village
The tomb is located on the loess plateau on the southern slope of Wenwang Mountain, with a ravine to the south and an alluvial ditch up to 100 meters deep to the east, the Bian Dan Ditch, and the water of the Bian Dan Ditch flows into the Qishui River in the distance. From the sections on both sides of the gully, some remnants of white-gray house foundations and ash pits of human activities left by the Neolithic period can be seen.
Second, the excavation process is carried out in an orderly manner
A rigorous tomb archaeological excavation work can be divided into four stages: drilling, laying, excavation and finishing.
First of all, through a general understanding, these tombs are distributed in an area of about 3,000 square meters. Archaeologists drilled to find out the distribution of tombs in this area, and then recorded the depth of the tomb opening from the surface.
At this time, determine the base point, plan the excavation area, lay down the exploration party, and then you can start excavation.
Arrange the probes
First of all, the archaeological team hired migrant workers to dig up the cultivated soil layer, revealing the early strata under the soil layer that people usually cultivated. Generally on this formation, the remains of the life of the ancients will be found. Through observation, archaeologists found that the opening of the tomb that needed to be excavated this time was in this formation
。 In other words, the ancients dug down pits and built tombs on the currently exposed formations.
Because after the tomb is excavated, the deceased is buried, and then the tomb entrance is filled, the process of turning the soil, so the color of the soil within the tomb range is different from the soil that has not been excavated around.
Through this subtle difference, archaeologists identified 33 tombs in this area.
The location of the opening of the tomb is determined, and the excavation of the tomb can continue downwards. During the excavation process, archaeologists should always pay attention to various small phenomena and changes, and record the excavation of tombs.
So how to carry out a more standardized record of tomb excavations?
Third, carefully record the phenomenon of not missing the slightest phenomenon
Let's take tomb 21 (later known as M21), the largest tomb excavated in this excavation. The tomb is located in the west-central part of the entire cemetery. It is adjacent to the M26, about 4 meters apart, suggesting that there may be some kind of kinship between the two of them. After that, to record the direction of the tomb, M21 is in a north-south direction, with a direction of about 347°. In general, the different orientation of the tomb may represent different funerary customs, thus reflecting the different ethnic groups to which the tomb owner belongs.
Schematic diagram of Tomb No. 21
Next, the dimensions of the various parts of the M21 need to be recorded: 3 meters long, 2 meters wide, and about 2.95 meters from the surface depth. Around the burial chamber there is also a two-story platform of cooked soil that is 0.4-0.5 meters wide and about 0.8 meters high. These data are recorded because tombs of different sizes and sizes may represent different hierarchical positions of the tomb owner during his lifetime. In general, the larger the tomb, the higher the rank of the owner.
Then record the burial tools in the tomb, M21 is a coffin and a rafter. However, because of its age, the coffin is not well preserved, and it can only be inferred from the phenomenon of ruins that it was composed of 8 wooden planks, the length of the rafter is about 2 meters, the width is about 1.1 meters, and the height of the coffin is about 0.8 meters, and the condition of the coffin is unknown.
Inside the coffin, it is natural to record the situation of the bones of the tomb owner. The owner of the M21 tomb faces north, and the bones are poorly preserved, but the lower part is slightly better, and it can be recognized that the owner of the tomb is buried with a straight limb on his back. Through physical anthropology, the owner of the tomb is a woman of about 45-50 years old.
Finally, it is necessary to search for the burial items harvested from this excavation. It is a great pity that no bronzes were unearthed in the M21. However, a clay pot and many sea shells were unearthed in the tomb, highlighting the genus and high status of the tomb owner.
Pottery excavated from the Living Dragon Village cemetery
Fourth, there are several key problems that need to be solved in tomb excavations
The pottery mane is a landmark artifact for judging the age of the Western Zhou tombs.
Most of the pottery manes unearthed this time have short collars, corseted necks, and curved abdomen. This is a typical feature of the pottery mane of the early Western Zhou Dynasty.
Therefore, archaeologists have judged through synthesis that the age of this cemetery is about the early Western Zhou Dynasty.
A small jar with distinctive zhouren characteristics
Therefore, the owner of the tomb group of The Living Dragon Village is most likely a group of Zhou people in the early Western Zhou Dynasty.
Copper Ge excavated from the tomb of The Living Dragon Village (destroyed soldier burial)
Finally, since this archaeological excavation did not find anything particularly valuable, what is the point? There is no merit and hard work, digging such a cemetery, the significance is to see the state of life of the ancients and the world after death.
But the meaning is certainly more than that. If we look at this cemetery in the entire Guanzhong area, we will find that its geographical location is very important, it is located just north of the ruins of the Western Zhou capital City of Fenghao. This seems to imply that the meaning of its residence here has a certain relationship with the capital of the Western Zhou Dynasty. However, in the specific situation, we should still treat it conservatively.
It is conceivable that if we connect many of these seemingly ordinary sites and consider them holistically, we will get a comprehensive and macroscopic historical information.
Wen Shijun said
bibliography
Shaanxi Institute of Archaeology, Tongchuan Institute of Archaeology: "Briefing on the Excavation of the Western Zhou Cemetery in Shizhu Huolong Village, Yaozhou District, Tongchuan, Shaanxi", Archaeology and Cultural Relics, No. 6, 2019.
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