Jiayi Cemetery
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| Jiayi Cemetery | |
|---|---|
| 加依墓地 | |
| Location | |
| Country | China |
| Province/State | Xinjiang |
| Prefecture-level city | Turpan |
| Site | |
| Type | Cemetery |
| Culture | Subeixi culture |
| Period | First millennium BCE |
| In use | About 2800–2400 years ago (radiocarbon) |
| Cannabis finds | |
| Found | Plant remains, Seeds |
| 13 nearly whole female plants laid over a man in tomb M231; fruits, bracts and leaf fragments in pots from three other tombs | |
| Dated | c. 890–520 BCE |
| Dating | Radiocarbon |
| Identified by | Morphology, Microscopy, Chemical analysis |
| Held by | Turpan Museum |
The Jiayi Cemetery (加依墓地) is a burial ground of the first millennium BCE in the Turpan basin of Xinjiang, China. In one of its graves, tomb M231, 13 nearly whole female cannabis plants had been laid diagonally over the body of a man like a shroud. Radiocarbon dates from the cemetery fall between about 2800 and 2400 years ago.[1]
Site
The cemetery lies in stony desert on the edge of an oasis near Turpan, where grapevines are grown today, in a climate so dry that in many years almost no rain falls. It came to light during the digging of new graves for modern use. The whole cemetery was then uncovered, and 240 ancient tombs were excavated in salvage work. Sand and pebbles show that a riverbed ran close by, and reeds and cattails in the tombs point to water nearby for at least part of the year.[1]
The graves held bows and arrows, bones of goats or sheep, and a horse skull, but little grain. From these Hongen Jiang and colleagues inferred that the people buried there hunted and herded and lived mainly as pastoralists. By its pottery and other finds they assign the cemetery to the Subeixi culture, whose cemeteries and settlements in the basin, among them the Yanghai Tombs, date from about 1000 BCE to 100 CE.[1]
Tomb M231
Tomb M231 is a rectangular pit dug straight down into the earth. At its bottom stood a low bed frame of wooden slats, with a bundle of sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua) stems fixed along each long side. On the bed lay a man of about 35, his head on a pillow of common reed. Red earthenware pots, whole and broken, stood beside the bed. The tomb also held desiccated remains of green foxtail, Russian box thorn and naked barley.[1]
The 13 cannabis plants lay diagonally across the body. Their roots and lower stems were grouped together below the pelvis, and the stems and leaves ran in parallel up to just under the chin and along the left side of the face. In the dry climate the plants kept their shape, though they had turned yellowish brown. All were branched and had their roots. The flowering tops had been cut off every plant, leaving only small leaves and a few short inflorescences on the lower stalks.[1]
Three other tombs, M156, M157 and M237, held cannabis in their earthenware pots: fruits, bracts, fragments of leaf and short pieces of stem.[1]
Dating
Samples from the cemetery were dated by accelerator mass spectrometry at Peking University. In tomb M231 a cannabis stem and a reed straw from the pillow both gave 2510 ± 30 radiocarbon years before present, calibrated to 790–520 BCE; the man's femur gave 2545 ± 25 years, within 800–550 BCE. Cannabis fruits from tomb M156 were dated to 890–790 BCE and those from tomb M157 to 830–670 BCE. From these dates the team placed the cemetery at 2800 to 2400 years old.[1] Meng Ren and colleagues give the M231 plants as about 790–520 BCE and the shroud as about 800–400 BCE.[2]
Analyses
Jiang and colleagues identified the plants as Cannabis by their form and anatomy, under a stereomicroscope and a scanning electron microscope. Pressed flat, the plants measure 48.5 to 89.6 centimetres long. The taproots remain but the side roots are missing, probably torn away when the plants were pulled up. The stalks branch from the base or the middle, have a white pith, are nearly square in cross-section and ribbed, and are densely covered with glandular and non-glandular trichomes. The leaflets end in a long point and have coarsely toothed margins. Each fruit sits in a perianth inside a bract with a straight, pointed beak. The fruits (achenes) are oval, flattened and two-ribbed, 2.3 to 2.7 millimetres long and 1.8 to 2.2 millimetres wide, with a shiny surface marked by a fine network of veins.[1]
Ren and colleagues later analysed the M231 cannabis by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry as a reference for their study of the Jirzankal Cemetery. The plants still held cannabinol (CBN), cannabidiol (CBD) and cannabicyclol.[2]
Interpretations
Some unripe fruits still clung tightly within the inflorescences. From this Jiang and colleagues inferred that the plants were pulled up, and the man buried, in late summer, around the end of August or early September. The plants were all female, with nearly ripe seed, and their inflorescences were covered with golden glandular trichomes. Because the leaves had been pressed flat, the team took the plants to have been laid on the body fresh, and therefore probably grown nearby. In this they differ from the cannabis of tomb M90 at Yanghai, where only the inflorescences were found and which, in the team's view, may have been traded from a neighbouring region.[1]
Jiang and colleagues suggested that the man of M231 may have been a shaman. They grouped the Jiayi finds with those of Yanghai and of the Pazyryk burials in the Altai as evidence that the peoples of Central Eurasia used cannabis for ritual or medicinal purposes in the first millennium BCE.[1] Ren and colleagues cite the shroud as evidence for the ritual use of cannabis in prehistoric western China.[2]
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; Wang, Long; Merlin, Mark D.; Clarke, Robert C.; Pan, Yan; Zhang, Yong; Xiao, Guoqiang; Ding, Xiaolian (2016). "Ancient Cannabis burial shroud in a Central Eurasian cemetery". Economic Botany. 70 (3): 213–221. doi:10.1007/s12231-016-9351-1.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Ren, Meng; Tang, Zihua; Wu, Xinhua; Spengler, Robert; Jiang, Hongen; Yang, Yimin; Boivin, Nicole (2019). "The origins of cannabis smoking: chemical residue evidence from the first millennium BCE in the Pamirs". Science Advances. 5 (6) eaaw1391. doi:10.1126/sciadv.aaw1391.