Cultural relics protection, archaeology first. On April 20th, the Jiankou Great Wall Research Repair Project carried out pre-archaeological design, marking the official launch of archaeological excavations. This is the first time that the national Great Wall Protection Project has introduced archaeological links, focusing on the structure of the Great Wall, the causes of diseases, and the study of cultural relics value, which will provide more scientific basis for later repairs. This also marks that the protection of the Great Wall has shifted from the previous rescue protection to preventive protection.
The scope of the research repair of the Jiankou Great Wall is the Enemy Platform No. 141 to No. 145 of the Huairou Great Wall. In the morning, a team composed of two archaeological units and project design units came to this section of the Great Wall, one meter a meter forward, to check the impact of vegetation on the ground and the city wall, the damage of the enemy platform wall, the special points on the building structure, etc., to determine the key points and research methods of the next archaeology.
"The terrain of this section of the Great Wall is changeable, there are steep slope sections, gentle slope sections, and flat sections, and there are various forms of disease and damage to the enemy platform and the border wall, including empty drums, collapse, crooked flashes, cracks, and sinking. Sufficiently representative. Shang Heng, a researcher at the Beijing Municipal Institute of Cultural Heritage, said.
Among the 5 enemy stations, the No. 142 enemy platform is not on the side wall, but protrudes out, as if a general commands thousands of troops and horses in front of the team, so it is also called "General Shouguan", which is a famous scenic spot of the Jiankou Great Wall and the key point of this archaeology. When inspecting the remains of the second-story building of the enemy platform, Shang Heng said excitedly, "Our archaeology this time will focus on the small building on the second floor of the enemy platform, which used to be a place where soldiers lived or hoarded materials. We will take the soil here back to study, and if we can find carbonized grains or crops such as chestnut peels, we can explore the diet of the soldiers. ”
A vertical brick in the southwest corner of enemy platform No. 144 attracted everyone's attention. "This is called 'spinning', there should be a door opening below, in the past it may have been a convenient door for soldiers to enter and exit, if there are many convenient doors found in this area, it means that the area was once a key defense area." After further archaeological demonstration, if this is the convenient door, we will restore the display at a later stage to tell visitors about the past history of this place. Shang Heng introduced.
Not far ahead, plants growing in the cracks in the bricks arched the ground and caused the walls to tilt. "The impact of vegetation on walls and ground is also a key research topic for us. Previously, there have been different views on whether the trees on the Great Wall should be cleaned up. It is hoped that through this archaeological study, we can find out the degree of harm caused by different plant roots to the Great Wall itself, and provide a scientific basis for the later repair of whether it is Qing or not. Shang Heng said that the archaeology will introduce experts in botany to study the root systems of different species of plants, analyze which will destroy the Great Wall itself must be removed, and which can be retained. According to this, a manual can be written for the full-time protector of the Great Wall, and when inspecting, it is possible to see which plants need to be cleaned up and which do not.
Diagonally opposite the ground bulge, there is a piece of rubble on the ground of the wall facing the outer defensive side, and everyone speculates that this was once a fort. If gunpowder can be found nearby, it will help to study the performance of Ming Dynasty artillery and its gunpowder composition.
"The purpose of the great wall repair is not to repair the body how strong it is, but to better preserve and display the value points of cultural relics." Project designer Zhao Peng told reporters that for example, a pile of broken stones appeared on the wall of the complete wall, and there was no archaeological link in the past, and it was directly cleaned up during construction. With the archaeological link, it is necessary to study where these stones come from. There would ever have been a fort here. If so, it can be restored when repaired, retaining the value points instead of letting them be lost.
"Carrying out professional archaeology before the renovation is a change in the concept of the protection of the Great Wall, from the past focus on rescue protection to both rescue and preventive protection, from focusing on the protection of cultural relics to the overall protection of cultural ecology and the environment of heritage sites." Zhang Tong, director of the Huairou District Cultural Relics Institute, introduced that in the past, the protection and repair of the Great Wall relied more on experience, and there were many ambiguous areas. The "research repair" will focus on strengthening scientific research before construction, through the use of scientific and technological means, adding archaeological forces, collecting more scientific data on the types, causes and development trends of diseases on the Great Wall, using digital deduction of diseases, and formulating repair plans accordingly, providing a standardized and replicable technical route for the protection and repair of the Ming Dynasty Masonry Great Wall represented by the Jiankou Great Wall.