The mouth is slightly drawn, the drumming belly, the hoof-shaped feet, the outside of the two ears are decorated with two opposite dragon patterns, and the bottom of the mouth is decorated with six groups of animal face patterns with the bottom of the ribs… Now in the Capital Museum in downtown Beijing, the “Pansy” weighing more than 40 kilograms always attracts tourists to stop and watch.
This largest and heaviest bronze ceremonial vessel currently unearthed in the Beijing area is one of the “treasures of the town hall” of the Capital Museum. When it was unearthed, because of its large body and heavy body, it was deeply trapped in silt, and it was impossible to take it out by manpower, and finally had to tie the rope to the two “ears” of Ding, and a pulley was set up on the tomb before lifting it out of the water.
At the Fangshan Liuli River site, where Pansy was unearthed, archaeologists were pleasantly surprised to find that re-excavations more than 40 years later not only made more new archaeological discoveries, but also provided clues for further uncovering the mystery of the ancient Yan Kingdom.
The State of Yan was an important vassal state in northern China during the Western Zhou to Spring and Autumn Warring States periods, and was one of the Seven Warring States. The ruins of Liuli River are the fiefdoms of the Yan State in the early Zhou Dynasty, the earliest capital of the Yan State, and the earliest political, economic and cultural center of the Yan State.
“The Liuli River site is also precious material evidence of Beijing’s long history of city founding, and its discovery has advanced the history of Beijing’s founding to the Western Zhou Dynasty more than 3,000 years ago.” Guo Jingning, director of the archaeology department of the Beijing Municipal Administration of Cultural Relics, said the re-excavation of the Liuli River site was timely.
Since 2019, the Beijing Municipal Academy of Cultural Heritage, together with the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the School of Archaeology and Museum of Peking University and other units, has carried out archaeological work on the city site area and burial area of the Liuli River site. According to reports, in the past three years, 5 early Western Zhou tombs, 3 house sites, 1 suspected moat outside the city have been excavated at the Liuli River site, and more than 100 pieces of various cultural relics such as copperware, lacquerware, pottery, sea shells, ivory, silk fabric specimens and so on have been unearthed.
Guo Jingning introduced that this archaeological exploration adopts a combination of general exploration, key exploration and sampling exploration, and has a new understanding of the scope of the site, a new discovery of the shape of the relics, and a new understanding of the settlement structure. The results of archaeological investigation and exploration are reflected in the Liuli River Site Protection Plan (2020-2035), which covers 17 protected areas.3 square kilometers, far more than previously known about the site.
Chen Mingjie, director of the Beijing Municipal Administration of Cultural Relics, said that this archaeological work has provided a lot of valuable academic information for understanding the ritual music system, the sealing system, the burial system and burial customs, and the planning of early city sites in the Western Zhou Dynasty.
Wang Jing, the person in charge of the archaeological excavation site of the Liuli River site, introduced that the tomb of Pansy and Wuguan was unearthed this time with copper guan with inscriptions, but the inscription of the copper gui and the body of the copper gui are inconsistent, and its ornamentation is the same as the wuguan, but the inscription on the lid and the body of the vessel is exactly the opposite. Archaeologists speculate that the two bronze inscriptions depict the same person, which may help the study of the name and character system of the Western Zhou Dynasty.
On the cultural relics display platform on the site, newly unearthed bronze masks, animal-shaped copper ornaments, groups of copper carriage and horse tools, copper Ge, etc. are neatly arranged, and I see that they are beautifully decorated and rich in details.
“These are the first discoveries at the Liuli River site. And this bronze Ge, the back square part of the hollowed, the front is a triangular circle, from this shape inferred, there are cultural elements from the south, which also shows that the identity of the tomb owner is by no means ordinary. Wang Jing said.
Guo Jingning believes that the bronzes, pottery, lacquerware and other cultural relics unearthed this time further confirm the patriarchal system and sub-sealing system of the Western Zhou Dynasty. The form of these artifacts is within the overall form of the entire bronze ware of the Zhou Dynasty, but it has the characteristics of the northern region or the northern region of northern China.
“It can reflect Zhou Li’s tracking of North China, and the geographical importance of Beijing due to the connection between the north and the Central Plains, which shows that Beijing has been a multi-ethnic region since ancient times, highlighting its important role in the process of diversity and integration of Chinese civilization.” Guo Jingning said.
According to reports, the new round of excavations has realized the organic integration of field archaeology, scientific and technological archaeology and cultural relics protection. Since 2019, the Liulihe site has established a geographic information system in the large site in Beijing for the first time, unifying the results of remote sensing archaeology, aerial photography, electrophysical prospecting, exploration and excavation into the “one map” of the large site, and recording the whole process of excavation by videography, drawing and videographing layer by layer, establishing three-dimensional models, and comprehensively collecting information.
“This means that even after 100 years, people will be able to easily find the sites we excavated and find known distribution points.” Guo Jingning said that “this map” will be constantly updated with archaeological discoveries.
Advances in technology have also contributed to the on-site preservation of cultural relics. For example, some organic cultural relics such as lacquerware and silk fabrics can be extracted at the first time on site; For relics of different materials, cultural protection personnel can carry out cultural relics protection according to local conditions.
In this round of archaeological excavations, archaeologists paid more attention to the combination relationship between artifacts and the connection between the environment, which can provide more pure artifacts for understanding the burial process and funeral customs of tombs in the Western Zhou Dynasty.outside information. For example, Guo Jingning said that the discovery of new relic forms inside and outside the Liuli River site identified two types of tombs – residential and simple cemeteries, which deepened the archaeologists’ understanding of the structure and distribution of the cemetery. Reporter Luo Xin