Members of the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Archaeology Network got more than what they bargained for when digging in Dutou. Hidden by dirt for thousands of years, a series of wells soon made themselves present.
Dutou was once the capital of the county and was entirely encircled by a moat and filled with ancient tombs and mining sites.
Made powerful during the Han Dynasty from 206 BC until the Six Dynasties period which ended around 589 AD, archaeologists found two filled-in water wells which went 40 feet deep.
Inside, researchers came across almost 10,000 bamboo slips, many with writing in thick ink on their surfaces.
“Slips, typically made of wood or bamboo, served as the primary medium for writing among ancient Chinese people before the invention and popularisation of paper,” Chinese state media Xinhua News reported at the time of the discovery in late January.
Later dating found that the bamboo slips were over 1,700 years old, and held important records regarding local taxes, household registration, farmland, and other economic and administrative information.
The pieces of bamboo, then, would have acted as part of the city’s record books.
Chen Bin, a researcher with the Hunan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, told China Daily: “Some slips are like today’s business cards. People wrote down their names, honorary titles, and native places on the wood to socialise.
“They often wrote their own names in an artistic way. So these slips were not only for practical use but also as a way to appreciate each other’s calligraphy.”
Archaeologists working at the site described the wells as the “most important” finds ever made in Dutou.
Other finds made at the site include the ruins of residential properties, tombs, and hundreds of ancient artefacts relating to the day-to-day of city life.
Dutou sits extremely close to the East China Sea and would have once been a key trading hub. Its proximity to the sea landed it at the crossroads of goods being ferried to and from ancient docks.
Excavations first started taking place at Dutou in 2016, although the biggest breakthroughs didn’t come for a few years when specialist workers detected signs of the wells.
