The picture shows the unearthed sand brown pottery knot pottery bristle. Photo courtesy of the Fenghao Team of the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
Xi'an, March 12 (Reporter Zhang Yichen) reporters learned from the Fenghao team of the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on the 12th that the team conducted five consecutive years of archaeological excavations on the site of the pottery workshop in Dayuan Village, the site of Fengjing, from March 2017 to December 2021, with an excavation area of nearly 2,300 square meters, and found 18 pottery kilns, 126 ash pits, 29 tombs, 3 wells and 3 stoves in the Western Zhou Dynasty, and excavated pottery beats, pottery mats, circular pottery, spinning wheels, stone knives. There are more than 400 small utensils related to pottery such as mussel knives.
The Fengjing ruins are one of the ruins of the capital city of the Western Zhou Dynasty, and the ruins are distributed in the natural villages of Keshengzhuang, MawangCun, Zhangjiapo Village, Caozhai Village, Xinwang Village, Dayuan Village and Feng Village on the west bank of the Feng River, with a total area of about 8.62 square kilometers. In the summer of 2012, the Fenghao team of the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences discovered a concentrated distribution of 29 pottery kilns during archaeological exploration in the southwest of Dayuan Village, which is a typical pottery workshop site.
Guided by the concept of handicraft archaeological operation chain research, the excavation of the site adopts a refined excavation method and carries out multidisciplinary cooperative research in order to understand the age and nature of the site, reconstruct the handicraft production process, and explore its significance in the Fenghao Capital City Settlement.
The picture shows the excavated pottery beats, pottery mats and pottery pills. Photo courtesy of the Fenghao Team of the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
It is understood that the pottery kilns found at the site have two types: vertical flame kilns and horizontal semi-inverted flame kilns. However, each type of pottery kiln is not concentrated distribution, but has a variety of combinations, of which the phenomenon of vertical flame kilns and horizontal semi-inverted flame kilns sharing the same operating pit is the first discovery.
In addition to the remains of blue-gray pottery blanks, a large number of small stones that may be related to the processing of sand-filled pottery mixtures, pottery beats, pottery mats, circular pottery, spinning wheels, stone knives, mussel knives, pottery pills and other relics related to pottery, archaeologists have also found a large number of grass and wood ash, red-burned earth blocks, red-brown sand pottery pieces, and deformed pottery. In addition, garbage pits that may have dumped pottery garbage and waste were also found.
Fu Zhongyang, an associate researcher of the Fenghao Team of the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, introduced that according to the stratigraphic relationship and the typological analysis of excavated artifacts, the age of the pottery workshop site in Dayuan Village is in the early stage of the late Western Zhou Dynasty. Judging from the pottery system, the number of recognizable vessel types, the number of pottery billets and the number of pottery vessels excavated from various units of the site, the site is specially fired with sand-filled brown pottery knots. Judging from the excavations, both types of pottery kilns fired sand-filled brown pottery knots. Judging from the measurement data of the caliber of the excavated brown pottery knot, its shape is large and small. All these show that the products of the site are single and the degree of specialization is very high. It should also be the largest pottery site found in the Fenghao site.
According to Fu Zhongyang, this kind of sand-filled brown pottery knots were common in the middle and late Western Zhou Dynasty of the Fenghao site, while it was rare at the Zhouyuan site and the Luoyi site. This indicates that product consumption is still mainly within the scope of the Fenghao site. In addition, in the southeast of the site, there is also the largest bone-making workshop site in the Fenghao site, the Fengcun North Bone-making Workshop Site, which forms the "Hand Industrial Park" of the Fenghao Site.
Through the archaeological excavations in the past five years, the distribution range, age, nature and settlement layout of the pottery workshop site in Dayuan Village were basically understood, which not only provided important information for archaeologists to study the pottery process and pottery firing technology of the Western Zhou Dynasty, but also helped to deeply study the organization and management of handicraft production, social form, functional partitioning and even the settlement layout of the Fenghao site. (End)