Legacies longer than lifetimes
Excavations of an ancient cemetery in Shaanxi are uncovering stories about its elite occupants, Wang Ru reports.
No 325 tomb yielded a tomb brick with the inscription "Year 13 (AD 489) of the Taihe era" from the Northern Wei Dynasty. No 135 yielded another with "Year 15 (AD 549) of the Datong era" from the Western Wei Dynasty.
The other 146 tombs are from the Northern Zhou (557-581), Sui (581-618) and Tang dynasties, in the west, northeast and other empty areas of the cemetery. They are either catacombs with long slopes or vertical passages. The latter were also common in central Shaanxi at that time, according to Chai.
Not many artifacts have been unearthed from these tombs, except for a few clay pots, cups, coins and inscribed bricks.
Archaeologists have also analyzed the human bones discovered there.
"Through analysis, we have found the bones belonged to about 400 individuals, and the sex ratio is generally balanced — 100 females per 130 males. Most were between 25 and 50 years old," says Chai.
Since the scale of the cemetery is much larger than that of a single clan and the tombs' orientations remain consistent across different periods, unlike the neighboring tombs outside the moat from the same time period, archaeologists believe that they belong to a tribe, and those buried there must have a blood or geographical relationship.
