2021 has just passed, if you give a big ranking to many "Internet celebrities" that have emerged this year, then the most historical and cultural "Internet celebrities" are the golden masks excavated by the archaeology of the Sanxingdui site.
On January 5, 2021, when the golden mask was found in Pit 5, it was crumpled and looked like chocolate tin foil that had been clumped together and stepped on. At first, archaeologists thought it was just a small piece of gold that didn't look like a thing. But as the dirt on the surface was carefully removed, and the shape of the nose and ears gradually revealed, they realized that it might be a golden mask.
Samsung Pile Gold Mask: Early, I heard that when I woke up, everyone was busy giving me P charts? Image source: Sichuan Guanghan Sanxingdui Museum official Weibo
The restored gold mask only has half a face, but even if it is "half-faced", it is enough to shock the world. Suddenly, it became a popular "group favorite" on the Internet, and various comics and cultural and creative products derived around it were full of pits, and even some people really used gold to hand create a complete version of the gold mask.
Just when the craze set off by the golden mask fell silent after a year. The Sanxingdui archaeological site has once again exploded into popularity. Six days ago, on December 26, 2021, a strangely shaped bronze artifact was found in pit No. 8, with a head like a tiger's head and round ears, but with long horns, and a sturdy body raised backwards, playfully plucking its ass.
Sanxingdui is new again!
This strange guy is tentatively named "Tiger Head Dragon Body Bronze", although its whole is still being excavated, but it has been booked by the majority of netizens as the upcoming Year of the Tiger mascot - "Is this Sanxingdui to give everyone a New Year's greeting in advance?" ”
The Sanxingdui ruins always bring surprises to the world, and it seems that from the very beginning, its emergence has its own surprise setting. "Sleep for three thousand years, wake up and shock the world." Guanghan, Sichuan, where the Sanxingdui ruins are located, is also a magical treasure land. It is located in the western foothills of the Longquan Mountains in the northeast of the Chengdu Plain, and the ancient saying has the reputation of "great drought is not drought, Shu has Guanghan". The Sanxingdui ruins are distributed in Sanxingdui Village, seven kilometers west of Guanghan City.
Since the discovery of the No. 1 and No. 2 "Sacrifice Pit" in 1986, this once uninhabited small village has received continuous attention from all over the world. This year, the phased results of the archaeological excavation of the Sanxingdui site have been announced one after another, and the Sanxingdui site has completely stepped out of the textbook and become a veritable "net red" in the archaeological community, and "Sanxingdui is new" has become a hot spot that many netizens continue to track. The exquisite and majestic golden masks and bronze human faces that are very different from the culture of the Central Plains can always make people fall into a boundless reverie. Are the ancient Shu ancestors who forged these bronzes really our ancestors? Or from a distant alien civilization?
The other side of the story is the unknown exploration experience of generations of archaeologists at the Sanxingdui site. Since its first discovery, archaeological excavations and studies at the Sanxingdui site have also gone through nearly a century. What kind of hard work and lonely waiting did these archaeologists go through to unveil the mysterious and magnificent face of the ancient Shu civilization?
(This article is the B04-05 edition of the special issue of "I Dig Antiquities in China: A Hundred Years of Chinese Archaeology" on December 31, 2021, which reported "Sanxingdui and a Group of Archaeologists", and the full text of the main manuscript of "I Dig Antiquities in China" is coming soon, so stay tuned.) ）
Written by | Li Yongbo
Sanxingdui Year of the Tiger reservation mascot, dragon head tiger body bronze, image source: Sichuan Guanghan Sanxingdui Museum official Weibo
Unexpected discoveries and a craze for treasure hunting
In the spring of 1929, Sichuan was still in a state of warlord division, and there were often uninterrupted scuffles. Yan Daocheng, a farmer who lives in Zhenwu Village, Zhongxing Township, Guanghan, did not have time to pay attention to these major events, and he was at ease and dutifully irrigated in the ditches on his own side.
He found that the water flow was relatively small, so he found tools, lifted the water wheel with his son, and used a hoe to dig deep into the bottom of the ditch. The dull sound of "bang" surprised the Father and Son of the Yan family in the process of digging. Looking through the soil, there is a white jade stone ring under the ground. After laboriously lifting the stone ring, he found that there was another mystery hidden under it, and the hidden earth pit was piled with exquisite jade and stone tools.
Although Yan Daocheng was born as a farmer, he was not a farmer who could not read big characters. Yan Daocheng's fourth generation, Sun Yan Kaizheng, has publicly told that his ancestor Yan Daocheng read a lot of books when he was a child, but because of family conflicts, he was forced to move to Chengdu in middle age. At that time, he had done things in the county court, and the locals called him "Master Yan". When Master Yan saw these treasures, he recognized at a glance that these were valuable antique relics, and did not dare to speak up at the moment, and immediately buried the soil back. It was not until late at night that the relics in the pit were taken home.
In the following year or two, Yan Daocheng's father and son did some excavation work near the discovery site, but they did not gain much. The cautious Yan Daocheng chose to wait and see, and did not immediately take these unexpected gains to the jewelry market to sell. Who expected that not long after, Yan Daocheng got a serious illness, and the Yan family thought that it might be that the pit was dug too deeply, violating the "feng shui treasure land".
Yan Daocheng family portrait.
The term "feng shui" is a local saying. Yan Daocheng lives near the north bank of the Mamu River in Sanxingdui Village, where there is an arc-shaped terrace in the shape of a crescent, known as "Moon Bay", and on the other side of the river there are three circular loess mounds, which look like three stars distributed in a straight line, echoing the "Moon Bay". Therefore, the saying of "three stars with the moon" also spread, and was later included in the "Hanzhou Chronicle" as one of the "Eight Views of Hanzhou", which is also the origin of the name of the Sanxingdui site.
Yan Daocheng, who was sincerely afraid, held the psychology of "eroding wealth and avoiding disasters", and distributed and resold a large number of jade tools dug up to relatives and neighbors. The number of jade artifacts that the Yan family stumbled upon is not the same in all parties, from "several pieces", "large numbers", and "as many as three or four hundred pieces". Later, archaeologists collected information and found that these cultural relics included various types of jade tools such as jade bi, jade qun, jade circle, jade gui, stone bi, and stone beads. Among them, the number of stone bi is the largest, the most distinctive, and the diameter of the larger stone bi has reached 80 cm.
In the following three or four years, these cultural relics scattered after Yan Daocheng's excavation quickly fell into the second-hand market, attracting the attention of antique dealers. At that time, Gong Xitai, a famous connoisseur of gold stones in Chengdu, bought 4 pieces of jade from Yan Daocheng, and was so excited that he wrote a special article "Ancient Jade Examination" and published it in the school magazine of a school in Chengdu, declaring that these treasures were "extremely valuable", which led to a wave of folk treasure hunting, and the strange story of the Yan family digging ditches and discovering "Guanghan jade" also went away in relay and speculation.
Sanxingdui archaeological excavation of the first person
Among the large crowds of people who followed the "Guanghan Jade" were archdeacon Donnithorne, an English missionary who was preaching in Guanghan. Dong Duyi is not an archaeologist, but he soon realized that this batch of "Guanghan jade" that flows in the market is not only an expensive treasure, but also has a high scientific research value. He contacted his close friend, Brigadier Tao Zongbo, who was stationed in the local army, to help retrieve the lost cultural relics as soon as possible, and borrowed several pieces of jade to invite Daniel Dye, a geologist at West China Union University, to identify them.
The group came to Guanghan for the first time, so that the Yan Daocheng family realized the importance of these jade tools in archaeology for the first time, and the Yan family donated 5 pieces of jade tools to the West China Union University Museum (the predecessor of the Sichuan University Museum), and then gave the largest stone bi in the excavations. After such twists and turns, the artifacts finally met a figure who made an important contribution to the excavation history of the Sanxingdui site, David Graham, director of the Museum of West China Union University and archaeologist.
Ge Weihan was the first person to be excavated at the Sanxingdui site. However, like Dong Duyi, as an American, Ge Weihan traveled thousands of miles to China to preach and help the local poor and sick. On the eve of the Xinhai Revolution in 1911, Ge Weihan and his wife were on a steamship to Shanghai when they learned of the great changes that were taking place in the land. Since then, they have begun more than 30 years of Life in China. In 1931, Ge Weihan returned to the United States, studying archaeology and anthropology at the University of Chicago and Harvard University, and returned to Chengdu two years later to officially become the director of the Museum of West China Union University.
Gervais at the site of an archaeological excavation.
In March 1934, Ge Weihan formed an archaeological excavation team and went to Guanghan with great determination. According to Ge Weihan's record in the "Hanzhou (Guanghan) Excavation Briefing", by the time they arrived at the scene, the local area had already organized people to start excavations one step ahead of time. Ge Weihan immediately explained to the county magistrate Luo Yucang the serious harm of non-scientific excavations to historical relics and the irreparable losses that may be brought about. Luo Yucang was an enlightened man, and not only applied for the consent of the Provincial Government's Education Department for the Ge Weihan Excavation Team, but also sent a local team to protect them.
In the chaotic years of war, the local security in Guanghan was chaotic, thieves and bandits were rampant, and the first archaeological excavation of the Sanxingdui site was completed in only ten days. However, archaeological excavations have been fruitful, with more than 600 artifacts and fragments unearthed. As the first scientific archaeological excavation in the modern history of Sichuan, it has a landmark significance for the Sanxingdui site and the origin of civilization in southwest China.
Based on the results of this archaeological excavation, geologist Dai Qianhe wrote the article "Sichuan Ancient Jade" and made a preliminary study on the age and nature of these excavated jade tools. More valuable for research is the "Briefing on the Excavation of Hanzhou (Guanghan)" written by Ge Weihan. He referred to the Swedish scholar Anderson's report on the excavated cultural relics excavated in Yangshao Village, Henan Province, and Li Ji's hosting of archaeological excavations at The Yin Ruins in Anyang, and published his research in the "Proceedings of the West China Frontier Research Society", which is still an important reference for archaeologists to study the Sanxingdui site.
In his report, Ge Weihan introduced the various forms of excavated cultural relics and put forward the idea of "Guanghan culture", limiting the dating of the site to the golden stone and using the age to the early Zhou Dynasty. In addition, Ge Weihan asked his assistant Lin Mingjun to send a letter to Guo Moruo, who was in Japan at the time, sending photos and artifacts excavated by Guanghan. In his reply, Guo Moruo initially agreed with Ge Weihan's judgment of the age and put forward his general views on the ancient Shu culture. He believes that the excavated cultural relics such as Yubi and Yugui are similar to the cultural relics unearthed in North China and the Central Plains, which indicates that the ancient Western Shu had cultural contact with the Central Plains. This well-known letter has also become an important witness to the history of Chinese archaeology.
Judging from the current archaeological research, some of the views in Gervais's report will also be subject to the limitations of the times. For example, Ge Weihan believes that these excavated cultural relics belong to funerary items, and the "Guanghan site" should be a "tomb". In 1946, Zheng Dekun's "History of Ancient Culture in Sichuan" listed a separate chapter on "Guanghan Culture", introducing the archaeological excavation results of Ge Weihan and others, which put forward a discussion of the view of "tomb theory". However, the academic controversy of the 1930s and 1940s pointed out the direction for the excavation and research of the Later Sanxingdui site.
A long wait for a generation of archaeologists
Archaeological excavations at the Sanxingdui site have experienced a long period of interruption and stagnation. Such a claim is not entirely unfounded. For a long time, the study of the Sanxingdui site relied almost entirely on archaeological excavations by Ge Weihan. With the introduction of relevant regulations at that time, foreigners were not allowed to do archaeological excavations in China, and the outbreak of the War of Resistance made further archaeological excavations a luxury. Therefore, in the impression of many people, the next archaeological excavation of Sanxingdui came directly to the discovery of the "sacrifice pit" in 1986.
Such fragmented splicing of memories often leaves out a lot of historical details that are worth remembering. Xu Jian, a professor in the Department of History at Shanghai University, was involved in the excavation of Pit No. 3 at this year's Sanxingdui site, and is also considered to be the first archaeologist to come out of this year's Sanxingdui archaeological site. Xu Jian pointed out at an event discussing the Sanxingdui site that since 1929, there have been two parallel threads in the narrative of the Sanxingdui site. One is the impression of the Sanxingdui site in public memory: the first discovery of Yan Daocheng, the discovery of the sacrificial pit in 1986, and the new results of the archaeological excavations from pits three to eight announced this year. These three powerful pulses have attracted the world's continuous attention and hot discussion, but ignore that under them, there is actually a "stable academic path, driven by generations of archaeologists, step by step, and still water".
If you follow the perspective provided by Xu Jian, you can find that the archaeological work of the Sanxingdui site that has lasted for more than half a century includes several generations of archaeologists who have silently devoted themselves to it, but have not had time to wait for the harvest results.
In the 1950s, feng Hanji, then president of the Southwest Museum, set up a task force to investigate cultural relics and monuments along the proposed railway line, and his primary goal was to inspect Moon Bay. The initial expedition did not yield much. Subsequently, Wang Jiayou and Jiangdian Chao, who were part of the task force, visited Moon Bay several times from 1955 to 1958, and they finally came to an important conclusion: "The Guanghan Ruins" (Sanxingdui Sites) are completely consistent with the cultural layers of the Moon Bay Sites. They preliminarily judged that the two sites were dated equivalent to the Yin Shang period, and issued an appeal to the archaeological community to further understand and study the "Guanghan culture".
"A Wake Up shocks the world", by Zhou Xinhua, published by Zhejiang Photography Publishing House, June 2021.
In 1963, Feng Hanji once again led the archaeological excavation team composed of the Sichuan Provincial Museum and the History Department of Sichuan University to select three excavation sites in Moon Bay to start archaeological research. The excavation lasted for more than 40 days, and the excavation area was more than 50 square meters, because the scope was limited and did not achieve the expected purpose.
Nevertheless, Feng Hanji left a prophetic view during the excavation: "The ruins in this area are so dense, it is likely that it was a central city of the ancient Shu Kingdom." In 1976, Feng Hanji instructed his student Tong Enzheng to write an article entitled "Remembering the Jade Tools Unearthed in Guanghan", and once again presciently proposed: "The accumulation of cultural layers here is very thick, and the scope is quite extensive, and it is likely to be an important political and economic center of the original ancient Shu State." A year later, the founder of archaeology in southwest China passed away and was unable to see the explosive discovery that followed.
In the 1980s, the local brick and tile kiln industry accelerated its development, and 10 brick factories were opened near the site of Sanxingdui. Sanxingdui became the land used by the local brick factory, and farmers found many stone tools and pottery pieces when they took soil to burn bricks, which immediately attracted the attention of the cultural relics protection department. In October 1980, the field archaeology team of the Sichuan Provincial Museum carried out a large-scale archaeological excavation of 1,200 square meters in the local area after extensive preparation.
The significance of this excavation is that for the first time, the official name of "Sanxingdui Culture" was confirmed. The archaeological team believes that the excavations have further confirmed the basic appearance of the ancient culture of the Sanxingdui site: "an ancient culture with a wide distribution in the Sichuan region, with distinctive characteristics, and different from any other archaeological culture", with the three conditions for naming the new archaeological culture proposed by Xia Nai. Soon, the staging of the Sanxingdui culture was also generally agreed by the archaeological community, which was divided into four periods, spanning from the late Neolithic to the early Western Zhou Dynasty.
In the years that followed, the field archaeological team carried out a number of archaeological excavations of varying scales. The accumulation and precipitation of archaeological excavations over the decades seems to be preparing for the summer of 1986 that shocked the world.
"Sleep for three thousand years, wake up and shock the world"
In the memories of many parties, the afternoon when the two "sacrifice pits" were discovered in 1986, the local weather in Sanxingdui was very hot and dry. The fishmen by the Duck River had called for ospreys to return to the cabin, and the weary workers of the brick factory were waiting to rest.
Suddenly, news came from the construction site of the Nanxing Second Brick Factory, and several pieces of jade were found at a depth of 2 meters above the surface. Chen De'an and Chen Xiandan, the excavation leaders of the Sichuan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, came to the scene when they heard the news, saw the exposed jade tools such as Yuge and Yuzhang, and immediately realized that it might be a major archaeological breakthrough discovery, and immediately reported to the Sichuan Provincial Cultural Relics Management Committee and Guanghan County while protecting the site, and prepared for the excavation work.
Starting on July 21, Chen De'an and his team used the exploration method to excavate, and it took three days to clean up the cultural layer inside the exploration party. As they were about to continue their excavations, the archaeologists suddenly realized a new problem. The summer heat of the Western Sichuan Plain is steaming, and a few muffled thunders from the sky make them vaguely worried, once the excavation process rains down, washing away the exploration party and jade tools, it will cause immeasurable consequences. In addition, rammed earth is unusually hard during the day and relatively soft at night to facilitate excavation work. So the archaeologists quickly made a decision, and set up a rain shelter and electric lights on the exploration side to prepare for overnight work.
The excavations persisted under such conditions. A few days later, two gentle-looking bronze heads burst out of the ground, both incinerated and deformed, one with obvious signs of destruction on the neck and the other with the top of the head falling off. Subsequently, a number of bronze human heads wearing flat hats and masks were also unearthed, and these bronze human heads were exaggerated in shape, buried in different ways, and had obvious signs of destruction. Jade tools are the most excavated artifacts in the pit, and a considerable part of them have been damaged and have been damaged in many places. There are also a large number of large animal skeletons that have been burned, which archaeologists have speculated may be the remains of elephants. These traces of being burned by fire have made many archaeologists deny the original "tomb theory" and "cellar burial theory" hypothesis. The main function of the pit is sacrifice, which has become the mainstream view of archaeology.
Just as the excavations were drawing to a close, the workers found a golden reflective object while cleaning up the bone residue. After cleaning it with bamboo sticks and brushes, the archaeologists thought it was a gold artifact with fish and other ornaments engraved on it. Chen De'an and his team held an emergency meeting while rejoicing, and immediately sent someone to notify the Guanghan County Armed Police Squadron to come to assist and protect the excavation site.
At more than 5:00 a.m., early villagers also gathered at the excavation site to look forward to the excavation of cultural relics. Chen Xiandan told the people around him that this may be a set of gold belts. When the artifacts were fully excavated, it was found that this was not a belt, but a golden rod more than 1 meter long.
Golden wand, image source: Sichuan Guanghan Sanxingdui Museum official Weibo
This golden rod, which symbolizes the royal power of ancient Shu culture, is the first golden rod found in the history of Chinese archaeology. The figure on the golden staff is carved with a round face, the mouth is in the shape of a smile, and the head wears a "jade crown", which forms a pattern with the fish and eagle patterns engraved on the golden staff, Chen Xiandan said, "We read the pattern engraved on the golden staff from left to right, which is exactly the three words 'Fish King', that is to say, the owner of the golden staff may be 'Fish King'".
Fish pattern in the details of the golden wand, image source: Sichuan Guanghan Sanxingdui Museum official Weibo
The excavation of the first "sacrifice pit" lasted for more than half a month, and when the archaeologists were ready to return to the station, a new "sacrifice pit" was found about twenty or thirty meters southeast of the sacrifice pit, in which a large number of bronze animal faces, gold masks, gold masks, and bronze heads of gold masks were found, and so on. Many of the bronzes are large and unprecedented in shape.
The archaeological excavation of the two "sacrificial pits" lasted for more than two months, and more than 700 bronze artifacts were excavated from the first and second pits, especially represented by bronze standing figures, bronze human faces, bronze animal faces, bronze longitudinal masks and bronze sacred trees in different forms. This humble village on the western Sichuan Plain has thus become the focus of the world's attention.
New discoveries, new mysteries
Since the excavation of the No. 1 and No. 2 "Sacrifice Pit" in 1986, it is no longer an urgent task to carry out new archaeological excavations in accordance with the principle of "protection first, rescue first". Researching, interpreting and digesting excavated cultural relics is the main work of Lei Yu, the current station manager of the Sanxingdui Site Workstation, and his team. Lei Yu also said many times in an interview that pit No. 1 and No. 2 have made the ancient Shu country famous in the world, and he has never expected new breakthrough discoveries.
In December 2019, a serendipitou discovery in the corner of the Sanxingdui scenic boardwalk made Lei Yu and his team realize that a major archaeological excavation may be waiting for him. Thunderstorm quickly found Chen De'an, the excavation leader of the No. 1 and No. 2 "Sacrifice Pits". It was dark below the boardwalk, Chen De'an could only touch it with his hands, and with years of experience, his first reaction was a big mouth. As a result, the excavation of the Sanxingdui site was started again, and the cultural relics from the Third Pit to the Eighth Pit that were later discovered successively have now become the annual archaeological news known to the public, and the Sanxingdui site has also become a veritable "super Internet celebrity" in the archaeological community.
In two years, archaeological excavations did not rush to "catch up". Lei Yu said that such an opportunity is "unattainable", the archaeological team wants to excavate as scientifically as possible under the premise of protection, if the means of protection can not keep up, it is better not to excavate for the time being, so it has been prepared for a long time. The archaeological site is protected by a protective greenhouse as the first layer of protection, and the archaeological work module with constant temperature and humidity as the second layer of protection. The archaeological cabin used for the first time is mainly to protect the cultural relics in the pit and fill the soil, and try not to be polluted by the outside world.
The kneeling figure unearthed from Pit No. 3 was hailed by Thunderstorm as a "national treasure-level cultural relic". "It has several dragon-shaped ornaments or bull-shaped ornaments from the mouth to the shoulders and abdomen, and there was no such attachment on the Dakou Zun before, it may be the only one in all of China, and there has never been a dragon-shaped ornament." This figure depicts the monster with the "dragon body and the head of the bull", "It can be seen that the Sanxingdui people are very open-minded, dare to do and dare to think, they pinch the cow and the dragon together, and make a very beautiful work of art." A kneeling figure like this should be used during the sacrifice in the royal temple. ”
The half-gold mask unearthed from Pit Five is the "face bearer" of this archaeological excavation, which is on the cover of almost all media reports, weighing about 280 grams. According to this speculation, the full weight of this gold mask should exceed 500 grams, surpassing the Shang Dynasty mask previously found in the First "Sacrifice Pit". The half mask is about 23 centimeters wide and 28 centimeters high, with a gold content of about 85% and a silver content of 13% to 14%.
Li Haichao, a professor at the School of Archaeology and Archaeology of Sichuan University, participated in the excavation of the golden mask. As a witness, he recalled in an interview the scene of the excavation site at that time: the state of the "gold leaf" was originally excavated, quite like the famous sun god bird at the Jinsha site, like a crumpled paper ball, completely flattened in the dirt, and the real shape could not be seen. "But in the process of gradual cleaning, the shape of the nose and ears can be recognized, and it is speculated that it is probably a gold mask, and everyone is very excited."
A new round of archaeological excavations at Sanxingdui continues.
In 1929, Yan Daocheng accidentally excavated soil, which opened the prelude to the archaeology of the Sanxingdui site. Foreign archaeologists represented by Ge Weihan, Feng Hanji and Wang Jiayou, who laid the cornerstone for archaeology after the founding of New China, Chen De'an, who discovered the No. 1 and Second "sacrifice pits", and today's Thunderstorm and Li Haichao, several generations of archaeologists have diligently explored the Sanxingdui site.
After nearly a hundred years, the archaeological process of the Sanxingdui site has not seen an end at all. With the continuous advancement of archaeological excavations, the mysterious Sanxingdui culture has left more mysteries to the world. In this land thousands of years ago, what kind of life did the ancestors of the ancient Shu live, and what kind of relationship did they maintain with the Central Plains culture? Why did they cast bronzes with all their efforts and bury them in the soil after careful arrangement? These questions seem to be more and more confusing the more they think about it, the academic circles have never formed a conclusive conclusion, and the folk are spreading the hypothesis of alien civilization.
However, it is undeniable that the archaeological discoveries of the Sanxingdui site make us more certain that in addition to the Shang civilization in the Central Plains, there was a relatively independent regional civilization in the middle and upper reaches of the Yangtze River in the same period. Together with the Baodun ruins, jinsha ruins and twelve bridge ruins, the Sanxingdui ruins outline the historical and cultural picture of the ancient Western Shu land.
Whatever you say, just applause. I give myself a round of applause. One of three bronze kneeling portraits unearthed from the No. 4 "Sacrifice Pit" of the Sanxingdui site. Image source: Sichuan Guanghan Sanxingdui Museum
Written by | Li Yongbo
Editors| Wang Qing, Li Yang
Proofreading | Xue Jingning and Liu Jun