The Fifteen Lectures on Archaeology of the Silk Road

Author: Lin Haicun
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
Features: Based on historical records from China and abroad and archaeological discoveries, this book presents major archaeological findings along the Silk Road from the Bronze Age to the era of Zheng He's voyages, along with the latest research achievements at home and abroad. Illustrated with images and easy to read, this book offers a new definition of the Silk Road: a cultural exchange route from the Yellow River and Yangtze River basins in ancient and medieval times, connecting India, Central Asia, West Asia to North Africa and Europe, primarily through silk trade. The target readers of this book are young people, suitable as popular reading material for improving cultural literacy among the general public; it can also be used as a textbook for general education courses in universities, where instructors can refer to its framework and basic content for supplementary teaching.
The Xiaohu No. 5 Cemetery is located on a small hill, where many ox heads and ram horns are placed outside the tombs. Inside the tombs, ox horns and ram horns are buried, with some tombs containing as many as 26 pieces. The wooden coffins are covered with whole ox hides or sheepskins, indicating that the tomb owners lived a pastoral life. At the center of the cemetery, a female tomb is topped with a "banquet hall" made of raw wood, fully demonstrating the important status of women in that society. The other tombs, like those in the Kerqmulu Cemetery, are arranged according to clan. Wooden railings separate each family's burial cluster, and life-sized wooden statues stand in front of the tombs. Inside the tombs, wooden figurines are buried, serving functions similar to the stone tablets, stone figures, and buried stone figurines in the Kerqmulu Cemetery.
History has astonishing similarities. Gandhara art, originally a stone carving art in Central Asia, became a wood or clay sculpture art after spreading to Xinjiang. The reason lies mainly in Xinjiang's lack of high-quality stone suitable for carving human figures. At the center of the Xiaohu Cemetery stands a large wooden sculpture of fertility worship, over 1.43 meters tall, which is striking and reminds one of the mysterious stone slabs in the Kerqmulu Cemetery—perhaps also objects of fertility worship? Due to the unique climatic conditions of the Tarim Basin, the ancient corpses and clothing in the Xiaohu Cemetery have been well-preserved. The tomb owners wore conical felt hats, identical in style to the conical hats worn by the stone figurines from the Kerqmulu Cemetery, which were collected in Qitai.
Although no pottery was found in the Xiaohu Cemetery, the conical grass baskets of the Gumuquan people are very similar to the conical pottery of Avanasyev and Kerqmulu, and the stone or wooden figurines buried with them again show their origin from the Kerqmulu culture. In the early 1980s, the discovery of the Gumuquan Cemetery on the north bank of the Koshon River, 70 kilometers west of Lop Nur, further unveiled the ancient culture of Loulan. In 1979, an archaeological team from the Xinjiang Institute of Archaeology found this ancient cemetery on the second terrace dunes of the lower reaches of the Koshon River, now known as the "Gumuquan Culture." So far, 42 tombs have been excavated, with two types of burial structures: one similar to the Xiaohu Cemetery, and another with seven rings of wooden stakes arranged around a wooden coffin, which is very spectacular.
According to radiocarbon dating, the first type of tomb dates back to approximately 1800–1700 BCE, while the second type of tomb cuts through the first type, indicating that the Xiaohu Cemetery was no later than 1800 BCE. The Gumuquan Cemetery spanned a long period, from 1800 to 1700 BCE. The owners of the second type of tomb were all male, suggesting that men had replaced women and began to play important roles in society. The burial goods in the Gumuquan Cemetery mainly included stone or wooden figurines, plain woven wool fabrics, wooden artifacts, and scattered bronze items, but no pottery was found. As the excavator Wang Binghua pointed out, the Gumuquan Cemetery undoubtedly belongs to the Bronze Age, as hundreds of wooden stakes in the cemetery show traces of being carved by bronze axes.
From the anthropological materials collected by Bergman in Lop Nur, people began to understand that the ancient Loulan people belonged to the Indo-European population. Chinese anthropologist Han Kangxin studied the skulls unearthed from the Gumuquan Cemetery and found many similarities with Bronze Age anthropological materials from southern Siberia, Kazakhstan, the lower Volga River, and the Caspian Sea coast, especially resembling the Nordic type of the European race, belonging to the primitive European population.