CCTV News: The State Administration of Cultural Heritage recently announced that in 2022, the mainland system will implement 18 major "archaeological China" projects. Inventory and sort out the new archaeological discoveries from the frontier to the Central Plains, and explore the answer to the era of "why China".
As soon as we entered 2022, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage held a major project work meeting of "Archaeological China", announcing the latest progress of Tibetan archaeology in four Tibets: the Chere site, the Mahao site, the Gebu Seru site, and the Dangxiong cemetery, covering a time span of tens of thousands of years.
"Chipping" stone "knives", a few millimeters to a few centimeters in size, archaeological discoveries of tools used by the Chege people 10,000 years ago, the ancient human migration from North China to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in the Stone Age, this disappearing historical puzzle, is also expected to be enriched. Animal bones such as fish and charcoal have been found at the Mahao site, and the picture of human fishing and hunting life on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau more than 4,000 years ago has been gradually revealed.
More than 200 pieces of glazed sand beads have been unearthed at the Gebuseru site more than 3,000 years ago, and the craftsmanship may have originated in Egypt. This discovery initially indicates that in the early Shang Dynasty, the Tibetan region of the mainland had exchanges and interactions with neighboring civilizations. The high-level tombs of the Tubo period found in Dangxiong, Lhasa, unearthed black and white stone chess pieces, and "ochre" pottery with the style of the Tang Dynasty, show the close cultural exchanges between Tubo and the Tang Dynasty, and have become an important empirical evidence of the exchanges and blending of various ethnic groups.
In 2022, archaeology found and confirmed the layout of the inner city, the outer city, the urn city and the outer urn city in the ruins of Houchengzui Shicheng in Inner Mongolia have the most complex and complete triple defense system in the Longshan period, which provides new clues for the study of prehistoric urban defense in the northern region.
In 2022, more than 500 sealing muds such as "Yizhou Taishouzhang" were found and confirmed at the site of the Kunming River Park in Yunnan. Among the more than 200 simple tablets, the characters such as "Dianchi Lake Yiting Xing" and "Jianling County" were identified, which empirically verified the records of "ancient Dian" in the "Records of History".
From the frontier to the Central Plains, from prehistoric human relics to the prosperity and development of unified multi-ethnic countries, through archaeology, the cultural relics found on the land of China show that Chinese civilization is as brilliant as a star.
In 2022, in the Shang Dynasty cemetery of Shangdu Shuyuan Street, Zhengzhou, Henan, more than 200 bronze ceremonial weapons and various artifacts such as jade, gold, and shell coins were unearthed, especially a "gold covering" weighing about 40 grams, with a gold content of up to 88%, providing a new reference material for finding the source of gold masks and gold decorations that appeared in southwest China such as Sanxingdui.
The archaeological results of the Kaifeng Prefecture Bridge and Bianhe site in Henan Province were officially announced for the first time in 2022. The stone wall of the Song Dynasty found is carved with a huge picture scroll, on the stone wall with a height of about 3.3 meters and a total length of 30 meters, four groups of patterns are carved in relief, each group of patterns is composed of a seahorse and two cranes ringed with auspicious clouds, which has become the largest stone carved mural in the Northern Song Dynasty found in China, representing the highest specifications of the stone work system and the highest level of carving technology in the Northern Song Dynasty in terms of scale, subject matter and style.
In 2022, archaeological sites, in the ruins of Shuomen Ancient Port in Wenzhou, Zhejiang, with the Song and Yuan culture as the main body, found and confirmed the remains of the ancient city's water and land city gates, wharves, dry fence buildings, and two shipwrecks. In particular, tens of tons of Longquan celadon, black glazed porcelain from Cizhou kiln in Jizhou, and shadow celadon from Jingdezhen were found one after another, and many kiln porcelain was gathered here, reflecting the prosperity of Wenzhou Port at that time.
At the recent meeting of the directors of the National Administration of Cultural Heritage, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage said that in 2023, the Chinese civilization source exploration project, frontier archaeology and historical research will be included in the focus of work, and the Xia Shang civilization research project will be planned, and the implementation of cultural relics protection projects such as cave temples, covered bridges, and mural color sculptures will continue to make efforts. Use archaeology to discover China, and use archaeology to interpret the development process of Chinese civilization from trickle to river.
(CCTV)