The silk remnants of about 38 × 3.1 mm in length and width excavated at Crater 4 at the Sanxingdui site are one of the most exciting new discoveries in the new round of archaeological excavations in Sanxingdui. Guo Jianbo, a librarian at the Cultural Relics Protection Center of the Sichuan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, once told Red Star News that not only had new archaeological discoveries in pit 4, but also found silk residues on bronzes and other fragments in the previous pits 1 and 2, and then found traces of silk residues in pits 3, 4, 6, 7 and 8. This reflects the prevalence of silk during the Sanxingdui period.
How was the silk found at the Sanxingdui site? What varieties of silk are there? What do these findings mean? During the chengdu museum's "Yunxiang Clothes - Silk Road Costume Culture Special Exhibition" hot exhibition, Zhou Yang, deputy director of the China Silk Museum and director of the key scientific research base of the State Administration of Textile and Cultural Relics Protection, brought a lecture entitled "Deciphering Sanxingdui Silk: Discovery and Significance" to unlock the Sanxingdui silk code buried for thousands of years.
"YunXiang Clothing - Silk Road Costume Culture Special Exhibition"
Cross-combining chemistry and archaeology,
Solved the 35-year gap in the archaeology of Sanxingdui silk
When we judge silk products, we will distinguish them by touching and looking. But how can silk, which has been reduced to dust or burned to ashes after thousands of years, be discovered?
Zhou Yang said that silk belongs to protein and is easily degraded during burial, while most of the cultural relics unearthed at Sanxingdui have burn marks. The mixture of silk residue and ashes, dirt, and artifacts in the pit poses a huge challenge to the search for silk. According to her, in the past decade, the China Silk Museum and Zhejiang Sci-Tech University and Zhejiang University have cooperated to develop a silk micro-trace detection technology based on the principle of immunology, which plays a sensitive, specific and convenient advantage at the archaeological site. "The most gratifying thing for me is to cross-combine chemistry and archaeology to solve the gap in the 35 years of Sanxingdui silk archaeology."
It is understood that the essence of the principle of immunology is the antigen-antibody reaction, which has certain advantages and is suitable for information extraction at archaeological sites. Using this technology, a large number of silk residues or silk marks were found in sanxingdui sacrifice pits 1 to 8, including bronze human heads, animal masks, copper eye bubbles, bronze statues, bronze snakes and other artifacts, as well as ashes and dirt in the pits.
The discovery of silk in the Sanxingdui sacrifice pit this time depends on the great progress of scientific cognitive methods and technology. With the collaboration of multidisciplinary teams, the research on organic matter residues in sanxingdui sacrificial pit has extended from the level of visible utensils to the molecular level that is invisible to the naked eye, which has greatly improved the level of information extraction at the archaeological site.
Bronze artifacts were excavated from pits 1 and 2 where silk marks were found
Textiles become mineralized imprints,
Varieties include silk, chic and woven fabrics
According to Zhou Yang, because the bronze ware continuously releases copper ions during the burial process, it can create a bacteriostatic micro-environment in the surrounding soil, which is conducive to the preservation of organic material cultural relics such as silk. Therefore, most of the textiles of the Shang Dynasty were attached to bronzes and gradually became mineralized marks on the surface of bronzes.
The surface of the bronze excavated in the Sanxingdui sacrifice pit also retains a large number of mineralized silk marks, and relevant experts can observe its morphology and can see that the silk varieties include silk, silk and weaving.
Among them, the discovery of silk is through the preservation of plain fabrics on some of the bronzes excavated from Sanxingdui, and after testing, it was found that the material is silk, and the silk fabrics in the plain fabrics can be commonly referred to as silk. The Qi, that is, "weaving as the text", is a jacquard fabric with a plain pattern of floating flowers, with different floating warp lines with different ability to reflect light, forming a dark flower pattern, which belongs to the higher-grade silk fabric. Chi was found in the copper eye bubble excavated from Pit 2. In addition, on the back of the bronze snake excavated from Pit 2, multiple layers of fabric were found, the outermost layer of which was a diagonal weave.
Schematic diagram of the microstructure on the copper eye bubble in pit 2
In the process of pluralism and integration of Chinese civilization,
Silk is a very significant element of convergence
In fact, early silk was not easy to come by, and its three major uses were sacrificial clothing, corpse clothing and regular clothing. Some records of silkworm sacrifices and sacrifice ceremonies in the Book of Rites show that not only must the sacrificial garments of the gods be made of silk, but also the silk obtained by the silkworm relatives must be made to reflect piety and respect. The ornamentation on the bronze Da Liren excavated from The No. 2 pit of Sanxingdui may be the earliest dragon robe. The four dragons on the costume, the dragon's head on the high, the dragon's claws clenched, this shape of the dragon is called Gun. The Shuowen records that "Gong, the Son of Heaven enjoys the first king", which coincides with the scene of the bronze Da Liren presiding over the sacrifice.
Zhou Yang introduced that silk may also be used as an object for sacrifice, such as a book or painting, and its intention should be to use silk as a carrier to convey the content of calligraphy and painting to another world. The Book of Veils was also used to write the Alliance between the two countries. There is a Chinese idiom "turning gango into jade", where jade and cloth are the materials for writing the national letter, which are either buried in the ground or burned with fire, indicating that the oath of alliance can be raised to heaven. Using immunological techniques, a very strong silk protein signal was detected in the ash layer of pit 4, indicating that a large amount of silk had been burned here, and also indicating another function of silk in the context of sacrifice.
Compared with the excavation of the Sanxingdui site in 1986, this new round of archaeological excavations of the sacrificial pit unearthed a large number of cultural relics at the same time, but also conducted detailed exploration of the surrounding area, providing a complete understanding of the ceremonial space, religious thought, and even the cosmic concept reflected at that time. In the future, if we use this as a basis to restore the deity system, aristocratic composition, offering decoration, and ceremonial space of the "temple" or "sacrifice area" at that time, we should not ignore the existence of silk. The discovery of silk will certainly provide more information and help us understand how the ancient Shu ancestors expressed religion three thousand years ago, how they thought about the universe and life and death.
Zhou Yang believes that Chinese civilization has long formed a grand pattern of pluralism and integration. The ancient Shu civilization represented by Sanxingdui and Jinsha is not only an important source and component of Chinese civilization, but also one of the most distinctive regional cultures in the community of ancient Chinese civilizations. Qin and Bashu, Shu and the vast southwest region were gradually integrated into China. In the process of integration, silk is a very significant element of convergence, and myths and legends, historical records, and archaeological discoveries all show that about silk, Bashu and Zhongyuan adhere to roughly the same knowledge system and value system.
Red Star News reporter Zeng Qi
Edited by Li Jie
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