Haihun Marquis cemetery
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| Haihun Marquis cemetery | |
|---|---|
| Graveyard of the Haihun Marquis; Guodun cemetery | |
 | |
| The seal bearing the name Liu He, from the marquis's tomb, on exhibition in 2016. The photo does not show cannabis. | |
| Location | |
| Country | China |
| Province/State | Jiangxi |
| Prefecture-level city | Nanchang |
| Coordinates | 29.03, 115.94 |
| Site | |
| Type | Cemetery |
| Period | Western Han dynasty |
| In use | Burial of Liu He, 59 BCE |
| Excavated | From 2011 |
| Excavated by | Jiangxi Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, under Yang Jun |
| Cannabis finds | |
| Found | Seeds |
| A pile of hemp fruits in the grain store of the marquis's tomb, M1 | |
| Dated | c. 59 BCE |
| Dating | Inscriptions, Radiocarbon |
| Identified by | Morphology |
The Haihun Marquis cemetery is the walled burial ground of Liu He, Marquis of Haihun, who died in 59 BCE. It lies on Mount Guodun in Xinjian County, Nanchang, in Jiangxi, China. The grain store of his tomb held piles of foxtail millet, rice, hemp fruits, sweet melon seeds and the stones of Japanese apricots, laid in for his use after death.[1]
Site and excavation
An ancient tomb was found on Mount Guodun in 2011, with the Gan river to the east and Poyang Lake to the north. The Jiangxi Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology then excavated the site under the direction of Yang Jun.[1]
The graveyard covers about 46,000 square metres within a trapezoidal wall of rammed earth. At its centre two large T-shaped tombs face south: M1, the tomb of the marquis, and M2, that of his wife. Seven smaller tombs, M3 to M9, lie to the north and east and are taken to be those of his concubines. There is also a chariot pit and three wells. More than 10,000 objects have been recovered, among them gold and bronze coins, bronze and iron goods, pottery, lacquerware, articles of bamboo and wood, and "silk and/or hemp fabrics".[1]
Tomb M1 is a mound 5 metres high on a terrace of rammed earth 2 metres high. Beneath them is a square wooden burial chamber about 17.1 metres a side and 8 metres deep, divided into a main chamber, outer chambers on the north, west and east, a store for horses and carriages, and passages. The coffin lay in the east part. Long waterlogging had destroyed the skeleton, though melon seeds survived where the belly had been. A seal bearing the name Liu He identifies the man buried there.[1] Hongen Jiang and colleagues describe him as "once a deposed emperor, but dying a marquis".[1]
Cannabis finds
The plant offerings lay in piles in the grain store of the north outer chamber of M1. Local archaeologists collected them by hand, since they could be recognised by eye. Among them was one pile of hemp fruits (achenes) of Cannabis sativa. Like the rest of the plant remains they were waterlogged. Only the seed coats survive; they are 3.3 to 5.0 millimetres long and 2.6 to 3.7 millimetres wide.[1]
Dating
The cemetery is dated by the death of Liu He in 59 BCE. Two samples from the graveyard were dated by accelerator mass spectrometry at Peking University: a peach stone from well J3, calibrated to 95 BCE–26 CE, and wood from the chariot pit, mostly 169–19 BCE. Jiang and colleagues found both in agreement with the year of Liu He's death and with the gold and bronze coins from the site.[1]
Analyses
The remains were dried on site and then sorted and identified at the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. They were identified by their form and anatomy under a stereomicroscope.[1]
Interpretations
Jiang and colleagues read the millet, rice and hemp of M1 as grain deliberately chosen for the marquis's use in the next world, as in other cemeteries of the period. In their account hemp was an important crop in ancient China, grown for fibre, medicine and oil before sesame arrived, and was one of the "five cereals" (wugu), whose traditional list usually included hemp seed and beans. The foxtail millet they connect with Liu He's long residence in Chang'an in the north, where it was the staple, and the rice with its place as the staple grain of southern China, where it was first domesticated in the Yangtze valley.[1]
The three wells yielded the remains of 73 plant taxa, from which the team reconstructed the planting of the graveyard, dominated by Chinese arborvitae (Platycladus orientalis), a tree of solemnity in Chinese tradition.[1]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 Jiang, Hongen; Yang, Jun; Liang, Tongjun; Zhang, Zhiyong; Wang, Shuzhi; Qi, Xuekai; Sheng, Pengfei (2021). "Palaeoethnobotanical analysis of plant remains discovered in the graveyard of the Haihun Marquis, Nanchang, China". Vegetation History and Archaeobotany. 30 (1): 119–135. doi:10.1007/s00334-020-00821-y.