Mysterious artefacts hint at ancient China’s ‘fairy world’
Abronze sculpture of a snake with a human head, along with a large number of other artefacts including finds made of bronze, jade and gold, have been discovered in a series of pits at the archaeological site Sanxingdui in Sichuan, China. The discoveries also include a bronze box with jade inside, gold masks and a bronze altar. “The sculptures are very complex and imaginative, reflecting the fairy world imagined by people at that time, and they demonstrate the diversity and richness of Chinese civilisation,” Zhao Hao, an associate professor at Peking University, said.
Two pits were excavated in the 1980s, and six more have been excavated since 2020. Archaeologists have discovered a total of 13,000 artefacts that are believed to date to the Bronze Age, between 4,500 and 3,000 years ago. As for the recently unearthed sculptures and artefacts, “it’s great to find more,” said Chen Shen, a senior curator at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum. Shen noted that the first two pits to be excavated in 1986 contained artefacts that were similar to the new discoveries. Shen curated an exhibition on Sanxingdui at the Royal Ontario Museum in 2002 and has conducted research on the excavations and written about the site. To date, no evidence
of human burials or cremation have been found there, suggesting that the pits were likely not funerary. However, the creation of the pits and the addition of artefacts may have served a ritual purpose, Shen added. Some of the artefacts show signs of being deliberately broken or burned. “The purposeful breakage and burning of highly valuable materials such as jades and bronzes shows us that this was not random or wanton destruction,” said Jay Xu, the director and CEO of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.
“Bronze was so valuable – especially since it could be melted down and reused – that it tells us that the destruction of these images served an important ritual purpose,” Xu said. “As with other human societies, ritual breaking and burning is often about a sanctified passage or communion with a world beyond our own. These burials were perhaps an attempt to move this society through crises with guidance or help from another realm,” Xu said. Researchers will know more when “we are able to have a complete sense of the objects within the new pits, their processes of disposal and the relationships among things,” said Rowan Flad, an archaeology professor in the department of anthropology at Harvard University.