Terracotta Army Includes Women And Children, Study Finds

(MENAFN- USA Art News) A new study of seventy-nine fingerprints discovered in the clay of China's Terracotta Army statues reveals that the workforce responsible for their creation in Xi'an included not only adult men but also women and children.

Published in the Journal of Cultural Heritage and highlighted by Archaeology News, the research indicates that most prints were found on areas like arms, armor, and heads, where potters would typically hold and shape the clay pieces. The spacing between fingerprint ridges expands as an individual grows, allowing researchers to estimate age and sex. Children have closely packed ridges, which widen with age. Adult men generally exhibit wider spacing than adult women, though the difference is only about half a millimeter. According to Archaeology News, previous studies struggled to distinguish between adult women and teenage boys due to their almost identical prints. Additionally, clay shrinkage by 2 to 12 percent during drying and firing means older prints are smaller than the fingers that made them.

The researchers utilized a model that analyzed the entire set of prints simultaneously, cross-referencing various age and sex combinations against measurements and comparing them to prints from living individuals. The findings attribute 45 percent of the prints to adult men, 33 percent to adult women, and 22 percent to children under the age of fifteen. This age aligns with Qin and Han legal texts that set the start of criminal responsibility, forced labor, and military service at fifteen years old.

This diverse workforce theory is further supported by historical records, as Archaeology News details,“Qin legal texts record convicted women doing earthmoving work beside men, and inscriptions on lacquerware from the period name adult women, girls and boys in state workshops. Bamboo slips from Shuihudi count the work of young slaves as units of production, and slips held by the Yuelu Academy describe apprenticeships in state workshops. At Zhengzhuang, near the mausoleum wall, archaeologists found iron neck collars and leg shackles, direct evidence that convicts worked on the site.” The research team plans to examine other pits containing terracotta warriors and establish a more extensive reference set of prints from ancient Chinese populations.

Source: Artforum

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