Laoguanshan Cemetery
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| Laoguanshan Cemetery | |
|---|---|
| Tianhui cemetery | |
| Location | |
| Country | China |
| Province/State | Sichuan |
| Sub-provincial city | Chengdu |
| Coordinates | 30.75, 104.12 |
| Site | |
| Type | Cemetery |
| Period | Western Han dynasty |
| In use | Tombs M2 and M3: reign of Emperor Jing, 157–141 BCE |
| Cannabis finds | |
| Found | Seeds |
| 120,600 whole fruits: 116,940 in tomb M2 and 3,660 in tomb M3 | |
| Dated | c. 165 BCE – 20 CE |
| Dating | Radiocarbon, Typology |
| Identified by | Morphology, Microscopy |
| Held by | Chengdu Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology |
The Laoguanshan Cemetery is a burial ground of the Western Han dynasty at Tianhui town in Chengdu, Sichuan, China. Two of its four excavated tombs, M2 and M3, held more than 120,000 whole cannabis fruits. Tomb M3 also held medical texts written on bamboo slips, one of which gives a prescription made with cannabis.[1]
Site and excavation
Four tombs, M1 to M4, were excavated at Tianhui. They lie roughly in a north–south line: M2 and M3 about 30 and 35 metres north of M1, and M4 about 420 metres to the south-east. The tombs were full of water when they were opened, and the plant remains in them were uncharred or only slightly charred. The burial chambers and coffins were built of large wooden slabs and finely lacquered, and the grave goods were rich and delicate; Bai and colleagues take these as signs of high status. The plant remains were recovered by flotation.[1]
Tomb M2 held a single coffin with the remains of a woman aged between 40 and 50. Among its goods were four model looms with figurines of weavers, which have been read as evidence for the weaving of Shu brocade in Han Chengdu. Her skeleton shows bony outgrowths on the vertebrae of the chest, lower back and sacrum, and calcification on the bones of the right arm.[1]
Tomb M3 held two coffins, one with a woman who died at about 20 and one with an adult man. It contained medical texts on bamboo slips, a model of the human body marked with the acupuncture channels, and a mortar and pestle. From the slips five medical books have been identified, among them books on the channels (Maishu), on acupuncture (Cishu) and a book of mixtures and decoctions for sixty diseases. The cemetery has yielded 951 medical bamboo slips in all.[1]
Cannabis finds
Cannabis was found only in tombs M2 and M3: 116,940 whole fruits in M2 and 3,660 in M3. Yunjun Bai and colleagues describe the find as "the most cannabis fruits unearthed from a cemetery anywhere in the world that have been statistically analysed so far". The fruits are kept at the Chengdu Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology.[1]
Dating
Fruits from tomb M3 were dated by radiocarbon at the Beta Analytic laboratory to 2050 ± 30 years before present, calibrated to 2115–1930 years before present, about 165 BCE to 20 CE. Coins of the banliang type found in the tombs date M2 and M3 to the reign of Emperor Jing, 157–141 BCE.[1]
Analyses
The fruits were examined under a light microscope and a scanning electron microscope and compared with living cultivated cannabis from Zhenkang County in Yunnan and wild cannabis from Nilka County in Xinjiang. They are oval achenes with two side ribs, a tapering tip and a rounded or squared base. Their fruit wall has three layers, the innermost made of large cells with heavily thickened walls and covered on its inner face with dense knob-like protrusions. Inside each fruit only the thin seed coat survives, its outer face marked by rows of crater-like pits. Bai and colleagues found this combination of features within the genus Cannabis. Given the dispute over how many species the genus holds, they name the plant only as cannabis.[1]
The fruits of the two tombs differ. Twenty fruits from M2 average 4.16 millimetres long, 3.31 wide and 2.81 thick, and those from M3 3.46, 2.77 and 1.90 millimetres. The M2 fruits show a mosaic pattern on the surface, with no remnant of the perianth and no drawn-out base, which Bai and colleagues match with cultivated cannabis. The M3 fruits are smaller, lack the mosaic and have a slightly drawn-out base, which they match with wild plants.[1]
Interpretations
Bai and colleagues argue that the fruits were medicine, used in daily life rather than in ritual. Under the Confucian values of the Han, in their account, the psychoactive use of cannabis was frowned upon. The bamboo slips record a prescription "for stopping uterine bleeding" in which cannabis is gently fried and ground into oil, then taken with fine wine before meals each morning and evening. From the method they take the part used to have been the seed. Of the roughly 250 drugs named on the slips, cannabis is one of the few plants also found in the tomb.[1]
On this reading the man in M3 may have been a physician who used cannabis seed in his practice. The authors suggest that the young woman buried with him, whose early death they consider unnatural, may have taken it against severe bleeding of the womb. For the woman in M2 they read the changes in her spine and right arm as injuries from heavy labour, and suggest that cannabis seed, which later Chinese medical books prescribe for severe lower back pain and painful joints, may have been used to treat her. They explain the smaller number of wild-type fruits in M3 by the physician's preference for wild plants, which they take to be more potent. They thought it unlikely that the cannabis was buried for its fibre, since the looms of M2 wove silk, hemp cloth was the dress of common people, and fibre came mainly from male plants. Rice, not cannabis, was in their view the staple grain of the tombs, though they do not rule out that the M2 fruits were also eaten.[1]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 Bai, Yunjun; Jiang, Ming; Xie, Tao; Jiang, Chao; Gu, Man; Zhou, Xinying; Yan, Xue; Yuan, Yuan; Huang, Luqi (2021). "Archaeobotanical evidence of the use of medicinal cannabis in a secular context unearthed from south China". Journal of Ethnopharmacology. 275 114114. doi:10.1016/j.jep.2021.114114.