Who really made China’s Terracotta Army? Fingerprints reveal new clues on the builders of the life-size terracotta figures
The Terracotta Army is a stunning testament to the power of the ancient Chinese emperors.
And now, scientists have revealed tantalising clues about who really made the gargantuan funeral monument.
Researchers have analysed fingerprints made in the clay when it was still wet by artisans more than 2,200 years ago.
And it suggests that women and even children played a major role in crafting the life-size army.
According to the study, published in the Journal of Cultural Heritage, only 45 per cent of fingerprints were left by adult men.
Adult women made up nearly 33 per cent of the prints, while children under 15 years old left 22 per cent of all the surviving marks.
Scientists have analysed fingerprints pressed into the warriors of the Terracotta Army more than 2,000 years ago to reveal who really built this incredible monument
The Terracotta Army was constructed in the early third century BC as part of the vast funeral complex of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China.
At that time, it was believed that the emperor would need a great army to guard him and fight his battles in the afterlife.
So, shortly after ascending the throne at the age of just 13, Emperor Qin Shihuang commissioned the creation of a vast army he could take with him beyond the grave.
Spread across three vast pits, the army contains life-like sculptures of over 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots, 520 horses and 150 cavalrymen.
While they are now a reddish brown, each warrior would have originally been brightly painted with pigments made from grinding down precious stones.
This enormous construction effort is believed to have taken around four decades. And it would have required a no less impressive army of sculptors, painters and kiln operators to complete.
Archaeologists believe that there may have been ancient factory-like workshops, mass-producing heads or arms before shipping them to other workshops for assembly.
Previous research has distinguished between warriors made by ‘royal’ potters, who marked their work with a special symbol, and those produced by local potters.
Scientists looked at the distance between fingerprint ridges, which increases with age and is different between men and women
Spread across three vast pits, the army contains life-like sculptures of over 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots, 520 horses and 150 cavalrymen, and would have taken more than a decade to create
However, archaeologists still know next to nothing about the people who made this spectacular monument.
The previous assumption had been that large-scale construction projects in ancient China relied almost exclusively on adult male workers but new evidence has begun to overturn this assumption.
Scientists looked at 79 fingerprints from 36 warriors, found pressed into the arms, heads, and body armour of the sculptures.
They then measured the distance between the fingerprint ridges, which increase in distance as children grow and are different in women and men.
Previous attempts to use this method have struggled to tell the difference between adult women and children, due to the similar gaps between their fingerprint ridges.
However, the researchers were able to use a modern statistical analysis method called a Bayesian mixture model to help detect the differences.
Instead of classifying every single mark individually, this method analyses the entire group of prints as a set and compares it with modern fingerprint databases for different ages and sexes.
The researchers write: ‘The model results indicate that the artisan community was not exclusively composed of adult males.
‘This biological evidence highly corroborates numerous historical records, vividly reconstructing the production scene in the Qin Dynasty’s state-run workshops where men and women served together, and adult artisans worked alongside juveniles, who may have been helpers or beginners.’
However, the researchers admit that the study does have some limitations.
Most significantly, this is a small sample size from a single spot within a staggeringly vast funeral complex.
The full mausoleum is a vast area surrounded by a 3.9-mile-long (6.3km) wall, modelled after the layout of the dynasty’s capital city complete with towers, stables, and even simulated rivers made out of liquid mercury.
This collection of prints, therefore, might only represent a single workshop or brief phase of the construction project, rather than representing an overall trend.
The researchers write: ‘Future work should extend fingerprint sampling to other pits and workshops to evaluate spatial and temporal variations in workforce structure.’
China’s Terracotta Warriors: The 8,000-strong army of statues built to protect the First Qin Emperor
Each of these 2,000-year-old figures was given personality and was coloured
The Terracotta Army is a form of funerary art buried with the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, in 210 to 209 BC and whose purpose was to protect the emperor in his afterlife.
One of the most famous archaeological sites in the world, it was discovered by chance by villagers in 1974, and excavation has been on-going at the site since that date.
An extraordinary feat of mass-production, each figure was given an individual personality although they were not intended to be portraits.
The figures vary in height according to their roles, with the tallest being the generals.
Current estimates are that there were more than 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots with 520 horses and 150 cavalry horses, the majority of which are still buried.
Since 1998, figures of terracotta acrobats, bureaucrats, musicians and bronze birds have also been discovered at the site.
They were designed to entertain the Emperor in his afterlife and they are of crucial importance to our understanding of his attempts to control the world even in death.
