Master Archaeologist

Chapter 337 From Sanxingdui Ruins to Jinsha Ruins
Boat coffin burial is an ancient burial custom distributed in southern my country.

Its basic feature is to put the body of the deceased into a coffin shaped like a boat, and then bury him.

There are different ways of burying ship coffins, such as hanging in caves, hanging on trees and buried in soil.

In Chen Han's hometown of Fujian Province, there are many boat coffins hanging from caves.

In his memory, when he was a child passing by on a relatively remote and mountainous road, he saw a cave dug by a person on the surrounding mountain walls, with some wooden coffins inside.

Later, these hanging burials were gradually properly transferred by the local archaeological department and re-buried.

The earliest boat coffins discovered so far are the two coffins taken from Guanyin Rock and Baiyan Rock in Wuyi Mountain, both of which are made of complete Phoebe wood, basically the same shape as the fishing boats used in southern Fujian and other places.

According to carbon measurements, the production time of the two coffins is more than 3500 years ago, about the Xia and Shang Dynasties, and some people estimate that it is the Shang and Zhou Dynasties.

However, most of the burials in Fujian are suspended in the air, and caves are dug on cliffs or mountain walls for burial.

Most of these boat coffins used as burial utensils were unearthed in Sichuan.

A boat is also in the shape of a canoe, but the earliest one is no more than the middle period of the Warring States Period, about 2500 years ago.

However, why did the ancients use boats as coffins?How did this custom come into being?What are the ideas underlying this custom?Why did the ancients use boats as coffins?

So far this is still a mystery of different opinions.

Among the boat coffin burials in Shu, the most famous one is the Baren boat coffin burial.

In 1954, when the Chongqing No. [-] Mechanism Brick and Tile Factory was digging the foundation for the factory building, many bronze wares were found.Therefore, the Southwest Museum came here to conduct a large-scale archaeological excavation, and unearthed a large number of tombs from the Warring States Period.

Among all kinds of tombs, only the Baren boat coffin is unique.

Seventeen tombs are neatly arranged and densely arranged, with their heads facing the Yangtze River.

The tombs are all vertical pits that can only accommodate a boat. The burial utensils are about 5 meters long and nanmu with a diameter of more than one meter is carved into a boat-shaped coffin.

The upper part is roughly semicircular, the bottom is slightly flattened, and the bottoms of both ends are beveled to make it tilt into a boat shape. A large hole is drilled at the first and last ends for burial with ropes.

There are two types of boat shapes, one is a relatively simple canoe, and the other is a small coffin inside, like an inner coffin and an outer outer coffin, and the other end forms a foot box.

The use of the boat coffins of the Ba people shows that the Ba people are a tribe that lives by the water and is familiar with water. They build boats for sailing, fishing in boats, or engage in water battles. After death, they are buried in similar boat coffins.

This is of great significance to the study of the customs of life and funeral in Chengdu and even Sichuan at that time.

The Ba people are actually the ethnic minority regimes that emerged in Shu after the Sanxingdui civilization.

At that time, there was a person from Ba and a person from Shu, and they were both called Bashu.

Later, Shu and Ba were successively annexed by Qin, and the fertile Sichuan Basin became the big granary of Qin, which gave Qin the capital to unify the six countries.

According to the current archaeological evidence, boat coffin burials first existed in the Western Zhou Dynasty.

Since the 50s, boat coffins have been unearthed frequently in the Three Gorges and eastern Sichuan. This was the territory of the Ba Kingdom in the pre-Qin period. Boat coffins were once considered a unique burial method for the Ba people.

However, with the gradual deepening of archaeology, the unearthed boat coffins in Chengdu Commercial Street in 2000 showed that Shu people also used boat coffins for burial.

At that time, experts generally believed that the specific time for Shu people to use boat coffins for burial was during the Warring States Period, not earlier than the Warring States Period.

In other words, the boat burial culture should have appeared only after the Western Zhou Dynasty.

Then, this guess was overturned again.

The Jinsha site, which has been sleeping for more than 3000 years, "woke up to shock the world". The most shocking thing is not the tens of thousands of ivory unearthed, and the exquisite gold, jade, and bronze wares.

Instead, in the burial area of ​​the Jinsha site, boat coffins were found again.

The appearance of boat coffins in the burial area of ​​the Jinsha site proves that boat coffins were used in Chengdu as early as the middle of the Western Zhou Dynasty.

This advances the "birth time" of the Shu people's boat coffins by 500 years!
It even surpassed the Ba people, which shows that the earliest boat coffin burials actually originated from the Shu people!

The discovery and excavation of the Sanxingdui and Jinsha ruins made the development of the ancient Shu Kingdom gradually clear.

How similar are the two ruins?

The Jinsha site and the Sanxingdui site are in the same line of sacrificial culture and have developed.

The styles and artistic styles of the artifacts unearthed from the two sites are very similar. The unearthed artifacts show that the ancient Shu people in Sanxingdui and the ancient Shu people in Jinsha shared common beliefs and worship, such as the worship of big trees and the worship of the sun.

A large number of artifacts that are highly similar to Sanxingdui were unearthed at the Jinsha site!

The two ruins are not far from each other. It can be seen from the religious beliefs, city site layout and time extension that the Jinsha ruins are the inheritance and development of the Sanxingdui culture. It is another political, cultural and economic center of the ancient Shu Kingdom after Sanxingdui. The beginning of Chengdu city!
It advances the history of Chengdu's construction to about 3000 years ago!
When the Jinsha site developed to the later stage, the transfer of its cultural center to the urban center of Chengdu today accumulated and created the urban history of Chengdu.

It can be said that the ancient Shu civilization represented by Sanxingdui and Jinsha Ruins gave birth to the urban culture of Chengdu.

It can basically be confirmed now that the Sichuan area passed through the earliest prehistoric ancient city sites in the Chengdu Plain, then went to the Sanxingdui site, to the Jinsha site, and then to the last Warring States ship coffin tomb!

These four cultures jointly constructed four different stages of the development and evolution of the ancient Shu civilization!
From the early prehistoric tribes, to the earliest Sanxingdui civilization at the same time as the Xia and Shang Dynasties, then to the pre-Qin period, spanning the Jinsha site from the end of the Shang Dynasty to the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, and finally to the Ba and Shu countries in the Warring States period, and then annexed by Qin .

Relying on this unremarkable "boat coffin burial", the lineage of Shu culture has been smoothed out!
It is worth mentioning that due to the long history, there is actually no actual boat coffin left in the tomb area of ​​the Jinsha site, but from the boat-shaped wooden remains, they can still conclude that the boat coffin was a commonly used funeral utensil at that time.

The so-called "boat-shaped wooden remains" is a section of soil with darker color and "long strip" traces.

The shape and appearance are almost exactly the same as those found in the Sanxingdui site in Moon Bay.

It is said to be a "wooden boat", but in fact there is only a pile of mud left, but the mud turned from rotten wood is darker than the surrounding soil layer.

It is definitely a big discovery that Moon Bay can issue a burial form that is suspected to be a boat coffin burial.

Of course, according to the depth of this investigation, these ship coffin burials are most likely not in the Sanxingdui civilization period, but in a later period, perhaps in the Western Zhou Dynasty, or in the Warring States Period.

However, in the range of Sanxingdui civilization, the discovery of boat coffin burials is of great significance.

Next, it is very meaningful to study the different stages of the development and evolution of ancient Shu civilization as long as it is clear about the age of these boat coffin burials!

(End of this chapter)