Chashancun Cemetery
More actions
| Chashancun Cemetery | |
|---|---|
| Location | |
| Country | China |
| Province/State | Gansu |
| County | Tianzhu Tibetan Autonomous County |
| Coordinates | 37.68, 102.38 |
| Elevation | 2,672 m |
| Site | |
| Type | Cemetery |
| Period | Tang dynasty |
| In use | Burial of 691 CE |
| Excavated | 2019 |
| Excavated by | Gansu Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology |
| Cannabis finds | |
| Found | Seeds |
| 426 hemp remains among the grain in three of the nine silk bags from the coffin chamber | |
| Dated | c. 691 CE |
| Dating | Inscriptions |
| Identified by | Morphology |
The Chashancun Cemetery is the tomb of Murong Zhi, a descendant of the royal house of the Tuyuhun who died in 691, high in the Qilian Mountains of Gansu, China. Nine silk bags of mixed grain lay in its coffin chamber. Three of them, studied at Lanzhou University, held 426 remains of hemp among more than 250,000 crop remains, most of them foxtail and broomcorn millet.[1]
Site and excavation
The tomb lies at the present-day village of Chashan in Qilian town, Tianzhu Tibetan Autonomous County, about 15 kilometres from the city of Wuwei, at 2,672 metres above sea level. The area has a mean annual temperature of about 1.6 °C and 200 to 400 millimetres of rain a year. Settlements and towns of the Tuyuhun and Tang periods lay at the feet of the range, to the south and north; the tomb was built on its crest.[1]
The Gansu Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology excavated the tomb in 2019 as a rescue excavation. It is a single brick chamber, covered by a dry sandy soil. That soil drains water poorly, and together with the low rainfall it kept the plant remains from decay. The grave goods included pottery, metalware, lacquerware, stone tools, silk, leather objects, sacrificed horses and sheep, and food crops.[1]
The burial
According to its epitaph, the tomb belonged to Murong Zhi, who died in the second year of the Tianshou era, 691, under the Zhou of Wu Zetian.[1] The Tuyuhun kingdom had been founded by Xianbei herders of the Murong clan and held the lands south of the Qilian range from 313 until 663, when the Tibetan Empire destroyed it. The Tuyuhun who remained allied themselves with the Tang dynasty. Most of the royal descendants moved to Wuwei in the Hexi Corridor or to Wuzhong in Ningxia, but all of them chose to be buried in the Wuwei area.[1]
Cannabis finds
The nine silk grain bags (wugunang, 五谷囊) were found in the coffin chamber. Four had broken, and their contents were moved into new numbered bags during the excavation. Three of the sample bags, the fifth, seventh and ninth, went to Lanzhou University for study.[1]
Together the three bags held 265,718 uncharred plant remains: 253,647 of crops and 12,071 of weeds. Foxtail millet made up about 62 per cent of the total and broomcorn millet about 31 per cent. The rest included hulled barley, buckwheat, beans and hemp, with a few grains of naked barley, wheat, flax and muskmelon. Hemp, identified as Cannabis sativa subsp. sativa, made up 0.16 per cent of the remains: 190 in the fifth bag, 152 in the seventh and 84 in the ninth. From the make-up of each bag and from the excavation notes, the team concluded that the plants had been mixed before they were packed into the nine bags, and took the three bags to represent the whole deposit.[1]
Analyses
The remains were identified by their form, compared with published identification keys, and photographed under a stereomicroscope.[1]
Because the remains were uncharred, the team measured their oxygen isotope ratios and trace elements to ask whether the crops had grown in one place. Eight hemp samples gave values of 19.4 to 20.6 parts per thousand, which grouped them with hulled barley and buckwheat and set them apart from the two millets. In the trace-element analysis hemp formed a cluster of its own. The authors inferred that the millets, barley, buckwheat and hemp had probably been grown in different areas, the barley, buckwheat and hemp perhaps in different places within one region. They added that the values might have shifted during the centuries of burial, and that the conclusion needed testing in further studies.[1]
Interpretations
Lu Yongxiu and colleagues read the dominance of millet as a sign that the Tuyuhun descendants had taken up the diet of the Tang. They compared the mix of grains with the crops buried at the Astana Cemetery near Turpan in the Jin and Tang periods. On their reading, the hemp may reflect the customs of the old Tuyuhun kingdom. They noted that the hemp of the Yanghai Tombs may have served in medicine and in shamanic practice, which was also the faith of the Tuyuhun. Hemp was also one of the Five Grains placed in tombs of the Han period. In their conclusion the hemp, the barley and the tomb's mountain-top setting all express the memory of an ancestral way of life.[1]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 Lu, Yongxiu; Liu, Bingbing; Liu, Ruiliang; et al. (2022). "The lifestyle of Tuyuhun royal descendants: identification and chemical analysis of buried plants in the Chashancun cemetery, northwest China". Frontiers in Plant Science. 13 972891. doi:10.3389/fpls.2022.972891.