Archaeology Magazine - March/April 2011 - 20

Stacks of roof tiles near one ancient house were waiting to be used in repairs when the Yellow River washed into the area. They include, according to Liu, some of the largest tiles ever found.

compounds. Each compound consists of a house, made of a series of covered rooms and courtyards surrounded by a rammed-earth wall, and the area immediately around it. One compound was surrounded by a moat, another by trees. Each of the four is within 500 yards of the next, and tests indicate there are at least 12 more sites within a few square miles. A bit further aﬁeld, the top of a Han Dynasty wall is visible, hinting that an entire city might lie in wait. Kidder jokes that if this ﬁnd had been made in America, where manpower is more limited, overwhelmed archaeologists might have covered it back up and run. After three years of visiting the site each summer, the American archaeologist still seems amused by his good fortune. Kidder, a self-proclaimed “river guy” or “dirt guy,” has spent most of his life studying the Mississippi River. He is most at home with mud in his hands, examining it through glasses that cling precariously to the tip of his nose. His Chinese host, Liu Haiwang, is a senior researcher at the Henan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and the head archaeologist at the site. He is thin and polite and extremely organized. While Kidder examined silt, Liu measured the scope of their archaeological task by putting together a meticulous 10-foot-square diorama of the area, with little blue lights ﬂickering around every possible new site. “The area is huge,” he says. It also presents a conservation challenge—the state of preservation is so excellent that the archaeologists are hesitant to disturb the ﬁrst layer of collapsed roof tiles and risk exposing what is underneath to Henan’s up-anddown climate. “We have to be careful; we have to go slowly,” says Liu.

A few yards further they hit more tiles—a collapsed roof. Two archaeological ﬁnds in one ditch were enough cause to notify the local authorities, and Liu’s institute sent him to investigate. He examined the ﬁnd, read the patterns on the roof tiles, and dated the remains to the ﬁrst half of the Han Dynasty. The construction crew changed direction again and Liu left for another project in the city of Chongqing. Two years later he returned to follow up on the earlier discovery. “It wasn’t until 2005 that we realized how signiﬁcant the ﬁnd was,” Liu says. “We found the ﬁelds.” The Han Dynasty ﬁelds at the site are preserved so perfectly that once they are exposed it looks as if they’d been plowed last week. The furrows begin just beyond the walls of each compound and Liu, citing historical records of farming practices, estimates they extend for around four square miles. The ﬁelds conﬁrm an important feature of the site—it is no monument, tomb, or tiny outpost, but an active farming settlement, a picture of everyday rural life from around 100 b.c. to a.d. 40. This is new territory for archaeologists in China, where most work is focused on imperial sites and cities, about which Chinese rulers and historians kept meticulous records. Here, however, Liu has a segment of society that has been left out of the histories and has been unexplored archaeologically. This is China’s ﬁrst look at a farming community far away from the gates of an imperial capital, outside the protective walls of any city. Over ﬁve years of excavation, Liu has uncovered a surprisingly interconnected and prosperous settlement. “There are historical records that tell us what life was like in Chang’an and Luoyang,” he says, referencing the capitals of the Western and Eastern Han Dynasties, respectively. “But in China’s plains, the lifestyle was diﬀerent—we’ve never researched it before because we’ve never had the material.” In most parts of rural China, when peasants left a place like this, they took their pots, plows, and tools with them. But at the site outside Sanyangzhuang, life was in motion when the water came. Roof tiles are carefully stacked outside of one

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f Kidder is a reader of rivers, Liu is ﬂuent in ceramic tiles. He ﬁrst came to Sanyangzhuang in 2003 on a familiar errand. A construction team digging an irrigation ditch hit what appeared to be a wall and a pile of roof tiles. So they changed direction.

A corner roof tile is decorated with the characters “Yi Shou Wan Sui,” or “long life,” a decoration reserved for well-to-do households. ARCHAEOLOGY • March/April 2011

Archaeology Magazine - March/April 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - March/April 2011