Repetitive but not boring, lonely but not boring, one sand, one soil, one world! In the long space-time tunnel, archaeologists have been searching for an answer for us: “Who am I?” A few days ago, the author followed Zhang Sen, assistant librarian of Zhejiang Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and executive leader of the Qujiang Mengjiang Village Tomb Archaeology Project, to visit the tombs in Mengjiang Village and the archaeological site of Shijiaoshan to appreciate the magical charm of this exploration of unknown projects.
Archaeology is like opening a blind box
As the executive leader of the tomb archaeology project in Mengjiang Village, Qujiang, Zhang Sen participated in the archaeological work almost the whole time. After nearly three years of archaeology of the tombs in Mengjiang Village, the conclusion that “it is very likely to be the tomb of the king of contempt” has made this group of tombs on the north bank of the Qujiang River famous, and the ancient kingdom of contempt has once again entered the public eye and become a topic of conversation. For Zhang Sen, what excites him is the moment of new discovery in the archaeological process.
“At first, when I saw the robbery holes and traces of destruction on the ancient tomb, I honestly didn’t have much hope.” Zhang Sen said that he didn’t want to, but in the excavation of the tomb group in Mengjiang Village, there were many surprises. First, in April 2020, they found signs of herringbone wooden rafters in Mound Tomb No. 1. This is rare in tomb archaeology and also means that this is a high-ranking tomb. Then, one day at the end of September 2020, at Mound No. 3, he and his colleague, Xu Xinming, an archaeology technician at the Zhejiang Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, and hired workers scraped noodles with hand shovels on the construction site as usual. Suddenly, he heard Xu Xinming hide his excitement and deliberately suppress his voice to call: “Quick, come quickly, look!” Zhang Sen walked over and was pleasantly surprised to find the burial objects exposed in the soil layer. As the workers pulled away the soil little by little, piles of funerary goods appeared. At this point, not only the exquisite artifacts buried underground for more than 3,000 years have been rediscovered one by one, but also archaeologists have more carriers when studying this tomb and regional culture.
Indeed, the unknown gives archaeological work endless stimuli and challenges.
“It’s like opening a blind box, a big blind box, and you never know what’s hidden inside until you open it!” In December 2021, Zhang Sen drove the blind box to a site about 6 kilometers northwest of the mound tombs. In a 1987 investigative briefing, Zhang Sen discovered the site. According to the inference that there is a tomb and a city, Zhang Sen listed this site as the key screening object of the city site. Subsequently, the exploration team entered, and in the depth of 1~2 meters, the fragments of printed pottery from the same period as the tomb group were detected, and the red-burned soil indicating human activities, rammed earth with city walls, and silt and sand soil of trenches were detected. There are human activities, there are walls, this is a city site! After preliminary exploration, a city site of more than 20,000 square meters was preliminarily judged to be delineated. As for how big this city is, whether it was the capital at that time, it is another blind box that Zhang Sen and his colleagues are about to open.
Let every grain of sand speak
On the morning of the author’s visit, on the No. 3 mound tomb on the north bank of the Qujiang River, Xu Xinming took a shovel and drew a line on the cross-section of the tomb tunnel to look at the soil layer. The river breeze was accustomed, and the dust on the upper surface of the pier was blown by the wind, escaped the covering film, blew in all directions, and blew into the tunnel where Xu Xinming worked. Each of these sands is a research object that Xu Xinming particularly cherishes.
“This layer of soil is no different from usual at rough glance, but if you look closely, you will find that each layer has different colors and the size of the stones it contains, and even the soil samples in the same probe may contain different substances.” Xu Xinming said that it was by studying these differences that they studied the structure of the tomb, restored the scenes built at that time, and then partially reflected the production and life of the people at that time. So, in the later excavations of the tomb complex, what he had to do was to make every grain of sand and stone speak.
“Look, depending on the color of the earth, there is a clear layering here. This bowl-shaped place is most likely a trench left over from later wartime. Xu Xinming took a shovel and scraped little by little on the profile, marking a thin line, and the information extracted by the on-site archaeology will become an important material for their further research.
“It’s like a detective, peeling back layers of silk.” Sampling, mapping, analysis, statistics, screening, comparison… Similarly, in Zhang Sen’s view, the long, repetitive work is their dialogue with one sand and one soil, and every unearthed stone and broken pottery piece is invaluable to them. Tracing their tracks, they can travel between the past and the present, unearthing oblivion relics and uncovering dusty histories. This is located in the 90s who graduated from Shandong University with a master’s degree in archaeology, and the direction of study is Shangzhou archaeology. He understood that there are only sporadic records of Gu Contempt in the history books, and according to the rule that “the importance of historical reconstruction is inversely proportional to the richness of historical materials”, excavating and studying Gu Contempt culture in Qujiang is a process of cultural exploration of the source of “confirming the scriptures and making up for the lack of Zhejiang culture”, and this unique regional culture depends on such archaeological work to build.
On this day, Zhang Sen once again led a group of visitors to the exploration site of Shijiaoshan Mountain. The bamboo shadows were struggling, the bamboo leaves rustled, and Zhang Sen explained to the visitors as he walked the newly taken soil. The soil shoveled by Luoyang has already told Zhang Sen that this was a city 3,000 years ago!
An archaeological diary of 10,000 words
“On May 25, the weather was clear, and Lao Wang of the exploration team reported that the culture accumulation near the rammed earth wall in the city was deep, and some ash pits of about 2 meters were found in some locations…” Every day after work, Zhang Sen and Xu Xinming would write their day’s work diary by hand in a paper notebook. From the beginning of the excavation of Mengjiang’s mound tomb in November 2019 to the current exploration of the ancient city site of Shijiaoshan, Zhang Sen and his colleagues have kept a diary of more than 100,000 words.
These diaries are simple with words like “Tuesday, September 29, 2020 light rain work stop”, complex five to six hundred words, detailing the new discoveries made during the day’s work. For example, Zhang Sen’s record of Mound No. 3 made a more detailed record and numbering of several different soil types and soil colors under the surface soil of the mound tomb, analyzing the different soil quality, and recording that “the soil layer left behind was analyzed to be stacked obliquely from the periphery to the center”. In Zhang Sen’s diary about Mound No. 1, from November 27, 2019 to July 22, 2021, a full 32,881 words were recorded, and the excavation of Pier No. 1 is complete.
“Keeping an archaeological diary is our most basic requirement.” Zhang Sen said that in archaeological work, there are many places to think, and the site will also find a variety of problems, especially when the ruins are destroyed, the site alone can not get any effective analysis results, need to be repeatedly observed, scrutinized, on the way to find the answer, these most primitive diaries have become an important source of clues. Moreover, for future research, these original records can provide the information needed for research over and over again, as opposed to the non-renewable nature of the remains. And in order to further document the progress of the work, they have to record even if the work is stopped on the same day. So from the beginning of the project to the end of the phase, there was a stoppage in the project, but the diary was uninterrupted. In the future, these work diaries will also be sealed as important archives.
At present, in order to facilitate preservation, Zhang Sen has also digitized the diary. Today, perusing these diaries, a picture of contempt for the ancient kingdom is slowly unfolding: in the ancient Xia Shang and Zhou Dynasty, the ancestors produced and worked in the land of western Zhejiang, they planted grain, went into the mountains to hunt and go down to the river to fish, used printed pottery and used primitive porcelain, wore jade and Dai Jue, and exchanged with the Central Plains…