CHENGDU, June 2 (Xinhua) -- A research institute in southwest China announced on Tuesday that carnelian artifacts unearthed at the famed Sanxingdui Ruins saw early cross-regional trades, revealing China's commercial network and cultural ties throughout the Bronze Age.
Liu Jiancheng, associate researcher of the Sichuan Provincial Cultural Relics and Archaeology Research Institute, introduced that 11 carnelian beads dating back to approximately 1200-1000 BC have been unearthed from the sacrificial pits at Sanxingdui.
They represent the southernmost carnelian artifacts known from the same period in China, providing crucial evidence for reconstructing the origin and spread of carnelian raw materials and bead ornaments in East Asia, according to Liu.
After conducting a trace element analysis on the carnelian beads, archaeologists discovered that the raw materials did not originate locally, but rather came from the Yanshan orogenic belt and areas further north, over 1,000 kilometers north of the Sichuan Basin.
They also discovered that these beads resembled raw materials from northern China when compared to carnelian beads discovered in Gansu, Shaanxi, and Beijing around the same time period. The findings suggested that between 1500 and 1000 BC, there existed an extensive and long-lasting network of commercial exchanges that included the southern Mongolian Plateau, the Loess Plateau, the eastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the Central Plains region, and the Sichuan Basin.
"About 3,000 years ago, the Sanxingdui society benefited from a long-distance interactive network that extended to northern China and possibly even the Mongolian Plateau, once again demonstrating that there was extensive and in-depth exchange and interaction among the cultures of various regions in China during the Bronze Age," said Liu.
"The pattern of diverse yet integrated Chinese civilization had already taken shape and developed thousands of years ago," the researcher added.
Carnelian beads suddenly appeared in large quantities at the high-level tombs of the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046 BC-771 BC), which were regarded as a symbol of social hierarchy and cultural identity.
The carnelian beads unearthed at the Sanxingdui sacrificial pits, together with gold wares, jade wares, ivory and other valuable sacrificial objects, indicated that the elite class of the ancient Shu Kingdom at that time could obtain high-value items from faraway regions, and the act of exchange itself was also a display of status and prestige, according to experts. ■
