Findings shed light on Sanxingdui layout

With the latest excavations at the Sanxingdui site in Guanghan, Sichuan province, revealing a jade-processing workshop, archaeologists are gradually piecing together a picture of what life in the ancient city looked like. Estimated to be 3,000 to 3,600 years old, the site has long amazed scholars and the public alike with its rich haul of artifacts.

At a meeting of the National Cultural Heritage Administration in Beijing on Thursday, the excavation of the jade-processing workshop, which is spread over 1,000 square meters, was announced.

Among the discoveries at the workshop were piles of stored stones, raw material pits and waste material deposits. Over 20 types of jade and stone artifacts were unearthed as well, including jade figurines, jade discs known as bi, stone tubes known as cong, hat-shaped stone objects and snake-shaped stone relics, said Ran Honglin, a researcher at the Sichuan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, who led the excavation.

The dating results indicate the objects were produced sometime between 1550 BC and 1250 BC. Ran said the workshop provided crucial clues to understanding previous findings. It proved that despite the artisans absorbing cultural elements from elsewhere, the Sanxingdui jade items could have been made locally.

The Sanxingdui site attracted global attention in 1986 when two pits, believed to have been used for ritualistic sacrifices, were excavated, together with a rich reserve of bronze and jade artifacts.

Between 2020 and 2022, another round of excavation at the site unearthed six more such "sacrificial pits" filled with stunning artifacts. Over 17,000 cultural relics were unearthed from the site, making it one of the biggest archaeological discoveries in China in recent years and turning Sanxingdui into a cultural buzzword among the public.