Page 207 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

SACRIFICIAL PITS After archaeological contexts become well known through repeated excavation and analysis,
investigators can make many plausible inferences from physical evidence. In Shang archaeology,
AT SANXINGDUI, burials constitute the most frequent context for bronze ritual vessels and jades, yielding a con-
siderable range of data for establishing periodization, the social identity of the deceased, the
GUANGHAN, ritual process that accompanied the interment, and many other features of the society that
created the tombs. An exceptional archaeological context, however, means that archaeologists
SICHUAN have few rules of thumb to guide their interpretations. When a find is made within an archaeo-
logical culture only recently recognized, the challenges are greater still. "Common knowledge"
PROVINCE does not exist, and each new report may alter even basic information. This perplexing situation
characterizes our understanding of the Sanxingdui culture of the Upper Yangzi macroregion
(Sichuan province) and most particularly the contents of the two pits discovered in summer 1986.
The area near Sanxingdui (located in Guanghan county to the north of Chengdu) was
recognized as a rich archaeological zone in the 19305. Archaeologists of the Sichuan Institute
1
have worked there for decades, and a major investigation of a large site began in igSo/^Si. The
site name has recently been applied to an archaeological culture that spans the late Neolithic
to the Zhou period. In July and August 1986, two pits were discovered by brick-factory workers
in the southern part of the Sanxingdui site, near sections of a large, pounded-earth wall that
once defined the ancient settlement. The site's excavators date these two pits to Period III at
Sanxingdui, and correlate that period in turn with the early segment of the Late Shang period
2
(Yinxu I-II). They identify the two finds as "sacrificial pits" — debris from two large burning
sacrifices presumably conducted by the community that resided in the nearby walled settle-
ment. That the site had specific associations with the elite is entirely plausible given the rich-
ness of the finds: more than sixty ivory tusks, hundreds of hardstone blades and other objects,
bronze ritual vessels, more than fifty life-size bronze heads, more than twenty bronze masks, a
life-size standing bronze figure, as well as various gold objects.
Even a basic description of these objects, however, is handicapped by the lack of a final
excavation report. The brief reports in print are synoptic, and much material remains unpub-
lished. Several conferences convened to investigate these finds have yielded interpretive essays
on broad topics rather than substantive additions to the data, and the pictorial record as well is
incomplete. Under these circumstances, many basic facts remain unresolved. For example, the
excavators argue that Pit 2 was later in date than Pit i, but the rationale for this dating appears
open to question; the pits apparently held almost no ceramics, which might have allowed a
dating relative to the site occupation. The supposed wider range and more evolved features
of objects in Pit 2 attest only the richer contents of that find, as Sun Hua has pointed out. 3
Arguments about the "sacrificial" character of these pits and about their supposed con-
nection to the Shu culture of the first millennium BCE offer still more opportunities for dispu-

tation. While the large volume of charred animal bones and other debris testifies to some kind
of conflagration, the contents and the pits themselves may correspond less to burning sacrifices

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