The Terracotta Army of China’s first emperor is one of the world’s most famous archaeological sites, but few of the tourists who pour through the tomb site near Xian in central China realise that excavations have continued uninterrupted since the thousands of pottery figures were first uncovered in 1974. Recent finds have shown a much greater variety of figures than hitherto known, including acrobats and musicians, as well as suits of stone armour.

Qin Shi Huang Di, “first august god of the Qin dynasty”, was a regional prince who conquered the last Zhou ruler in 221BC and unified much of eastern China into a single kingdom. It featured a common currency and political system that approached a police state in its degree of control. Before his death in 206BC he had begun construction of a massive tumulus at Lintong, east of his capital at Xian, and stocked his tomb, according to the later historian Sima Qian, with all manner of wonders in precious metals.

In 1974 the discovery of the Terracotta Army some distance east of the tumulus gave credence to these stories: more than 7,000 pottery warriors, equipped originally with real bronze weapons, were found in deep pits, including a command group in chariots. The search for a similar “spirit army” west of the mound has been unsuccessful, but several new pits have been found closer in, notably at the southeastern corner of the huge walled compound surrounding the tumulus.

Pit K9801 was found to contain numerous suits of armour, each made up of more than 600 stone plates perforated and strung together. They were made of a blue-grey hard limestone, and each suit weighed about 50kg (110 lb), with a helmet adding another 6kg. The armour is similar to that sculpted in clay on the terracotta warriors, but is believed to be a reproduction of what would in real life have been made of leather or thin metal plates.

Just to the south, pit K9901 has yielded nine figures of acrobats from the small section so far excavated. These are dressed only in kilts, with bare muscular chests and legs, and are shown in a variety of poses. Both pits had timber roofs that had been burned, as was the case with the Terracotta Army: Sima Qian describes how the invading Han destroyed the first Emperor’s tomb less than a decade after it was sealed, although the central mound shows no signs of having been entered.

At the southwest corner of the compound, pit K0006 held numerous horse bones and 12 figures of civilian officials in quilted robes. Each carried symbols of office, and some had knives and whetstones hanging at their belts, suggesting that they were record-keepers who used these instruments to scrape clean bamboo slips on which information could then be written or modified.

K0007 was bounded by a water channel, and along its banks stood bronze birds: swans, wild geese and cranes have been identified so far, one of the cranes with a bronze insect caught in its beak. A set of adjacent chambers held more pottery figures, some of them seated, others kneeling. From their poses they are thought to have portrayed musicians, playing stone bells and stringed instruments; bronze rods found in the pit are thought to have been used for striking the bells.





Lost land under the North Sea

Hamlet speaks of “the undiscover’d country, from whose bourne no traveller returns”: British archaeologists are now examining just such a country, unseen for eight millennia, and tracing its rivers, lakes and coastline. This lost land lies beneath the North Sea, and was drowned at the end of the last Ice Age; but until then it swarmed with game and was used by the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic hunters and fishers.

Stretching from Denmark to the East Coast of England, and with the formerly rich fishing grounds of the Dogger Bank among its highest points, this land included great estuaries where the Rhine and the Thames formerly reached the sea far north of their present locations. Now, an inspired collaboration between oil explorers and archaeologists is drawing a detailed picture of what it looked like.

Professor Vincent Gaffney, of Birmingham University, realised that the North Sea oil companies must have acquired enormous amounts of seismic data during their search for buried resources, and that the topographical evidence from the seabed itself had no commercial value to them. So he asked, and was duly given: Petroleum Geo-Services handed over details of more than 22,000 sq km (8,500 sq miles) that they had surveyed, which with processing equipment provided by Hewlett-Packard allowed his team to produce detailed maps of a drowned landscape the size of Wales.

A bone harpoon point dredged up in a fishing net decades ago showed that Magelmosian hunters had exploited this territory, and explained the striking similarities between the cultures straddling the North Sea. Professor Gaffney’s project and its two industrial sponsors were runner-up in the Developer-Funded Archaeology category of the recent British Archaeological Awards. The Press Award, sponsored by Wedgwood, went to the BBC Radio Five Live World Archaeology News, and the East Anglian magazine Treasure Your Past.

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