Peking University, Sept 20, 2018: From April to September, PKU’s School of Archaeology and Museology has worked together with Taiyuan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology on Taiyuan Dongshan M6 project. Recently, this team has discovered a lot of wooden bamboo slips dating back to the Xi Han Dynasty. This is the first time that such historic relics have been dug out in Shanxi province as well as on Loess Plateau.
The infrared photo of wooden bamboo slips
Wang Kai, an assistant professor from Historic Relics Preserving Laboratory of PKU’s School of Archaeology and Museology, oversaw the cultural relics’ protection. He and his colleagues have developed a new mode of lab archaeology. They built the analyzing laboratory right in the archaeological site and mixed several analyzing methods up to test the conserving situation of new-found relics, which further helped to provide scientific guidance for the whole digging work. This novel mode has augmented traditional information collection and set a model to other archaeological projects in semiarid regions.
Historic Relics Preserving Laboratory has contributed a lot to the work of saving the Qin and Han dynasty's wooden bamboo slips in Peking University and has already obtained many academic outputs. These historic relics found in M6 Lab will be sent to PKU for further study. In the future, the slips will promote PKU’s study of cultural relics and their conservation.
The photo of the team
This project is a co-op program between School of Archaeology and Museology and College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, with 5 double degree students taking part in historic relics’ conservation. Demonstrating PKU’s remarkable progress in undergraduate interdisciplinary courses, this program has become a milestone of PKU.
Written by: He Jin
Edited by: Zhou Yijing
