The mystery of the pits

The discovery at Sanxingdui of two pits filled with deliberately shattered bronzes, jades and fragments of gold and animal bone is the single most startling archaeological find of recent years. The objects were made by a people about whom little is known. Robert Bagley speculates about who they might have been...

Excavations at Sanxingdui, 40 kilometres north of Chengdu in Sichuan province, have revealed an ancient city with a large city wall, remains of buildings inside the wall, and two extraordinary sacrificial pits outside the wall, apparently dating from the 13th or 12th century BC.

A walled city in the Chengdu plain 1,000 kilometres from Anyang, the then capital of the Shang kingdom, is a startling discovery, but the finds leave no doubt that Sanxingdui was a major centre of early Bronze Age civilisation in close touch with other Shang centres. They also make it clear that we must broaden our definition of "Shang civilisation": for the contents of the two pits are very strange.

In 1986, archaeologists started to excavate the pits, following chance finds made by the workers of a local brick factory. Excavation of one revealed about 300 objects of gold, bronze, jade, stone and pottery, along with cowrie shells, 13 elephant tusks and more than three cubic metres of burnt and broken animals bones. The sheer quantity and type of artefact are extraordinary. The most astonishing are life-sized bronze heads with angular facial features and enormous eyes. Although the walls of the pit show no sign of fire, most of the artefacts, like the animals bones, were burned and broken and fragments of jades were found scattered about in a way that showed them to have been broken before they were put into the pit.

The excavators concluded that the pit was filled at the close of some large-scale sacrificial ceremony: large animals (perhaps pigs, sheep or oxen) were killed and burned; jades and bronzes were broken and burned and finally everything was dumped into the pit and buried.

The contents of a second pit, a generation or so later than the first, revealed even richer, stranger objects. While most of the artefacts again show signs of deliberate breakage and burning, they seem to have been deposited in three layers. The bottom layer contained jades, cowries and small items of bronze; the middle layer contained large bronzes, a life-sized statue on a high base, spirit trees, heads of various sizes, 15 bizarre faces and a dozen vessels. The top layer consisted of more than 60 charred elephant tusks strewn over the offerings.

With the exception of the 13th-century tomb of the Shang queen Fu Hao, no Shang site has ever yielded such a wealth of jade. The San- xingdui jades are primarily blades, knives and chisels. Although some scholars have assumed that the larger blades are ritual shapes made specifically for use as sacrificial offerings, the evidence is far from conclusive. One particular blade found, for instance, has sometimes been identified as a zhang, and since the Zhou Li, a book on ritual compiled no earlier than the fourth century BC, says that zhang were used as offerings to mountains, one archaeologist has taken the blade as evidence that the pits were sacrifices to a mountain. It is very improbable, however, that the compilers of the Zhou Li had any knowledge of ritual in the Chengdu plain in the 13th century BC.

Some commentators, in their first startled reaction to the finds, doubted that the pits were sacrifices at all, but the excavators have convincingly refuted alternative theories. The evidence marshalled argues compellingly that each pit represents a single sacrifice, performed on a majestic scale, involving burnt offerings of animals, bronzes, jades, ivory, cowries and other valuables. Unfortunately, we have no clue to the occasion, purpose or the intended recipient of the sacrifice. The only part of the Shang world that has yielded much information about sacrifice is Anyang itself and comparison with Anyang is useful only to throw into focus the sharp contrast between the Shang civilisation of metropolitan north China and that of the Chengdu plain.

Among the sacrificial victims unearthed by Anyang excavators there is a preponderance of human beings. In 1976 archaeologists digging at the Anyang royal cemetery excavated a neat grid of 191 sacrificial pits. The contents included 1,500 human victims, mostly men but also women and children, mostly beheaded, but some dismembered and a few buried alive. The pits apparently represent recurrent sacrifices to the deceased Shang kings, some of whom lay buried in huge tombs nearby. The sacrifices are exactly contemporary with the Sanxingdui pits, but very different in character.

At Sanxingdui animals were killed and burnt but there is no trace of human remains. The excavators have speculated that the bronze heads with their necks cut aslant were meant as substitutes for severed heads. And the oversized hands of the bronze statue, pictured on page i, may have been intended to hold an elephant tusk, in which case the statue might represent an officiant at the sacrifice. But why should the officiant end up in the pit along with his offerings? The contents of the Sanxingdui pits provide little explanation as to the ceremonies of which they were part. All we can say is that the religion that inspired these sacrifices must have been very different from anything known at Anyang.

Sanxingdui seems to have been one of the major cities of the Shang period. Its excavators suspect that they have found an early capital of the Shu kingdom, which in late Zhou times occupied the Chengdu plain but was extinguished by the state of Qin in 316BC.

The existence of such a civilised early Bronze Age Shu state is important in that it calls for an adjustment in our ideas about Shang China. The Anyang oracle texts are the only written documents that survive from the Shang period, and they provide a view of the world seen exclusively through the eyes of the Anyang kings. The historical traditions about the Shang which were formed under their successors, the Zhou, also have an Anyang bias, for the Zhou, who claimed to have inherited the Shang dynasty's right to rule, naturally insisted that that right extended over the whole of civilised China. Forced to depend on these two sources of information, until recently scholars had little means of escaping an Anyang-centred view of the Shang world. Over the past few decades, however, these new archaeological discoveries in outlying areas have begun to challenge the notion of a Shang empire surrounded by barbarians There now seems little doubt that the Yangtse and Iys tributaries were the highways of a traffic that linked the middle Yangtse region with southern Shaanxi and the Chengdu plain, perhaps skirting the territory of the Anyang king. Archaeology tells us frustratingly little about the states or kingdoms involved in this traffic, but shadowy as they are, they cannot have been minor or insignificant.

Archaeology, texts and the whole Chinese historical tradition have conspired to give us a picture of the Shang world in which the Shang empire is coextensive with Chinese civilisation. If the excavations at Sanxingdui do no more than make us uneasy with this picture, they will have earned an important place in the history of Chinese archaeology.

Robert Bagley is associate professor in the department of art and archaeology, Princeton University.