Wider World · Qin dynasty, 221–206 BC · Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China
2,200-year-old fingerprints suggest women and children helped make China's Terracotta Army
A study of 79 prints on figures in Pit 1 estimates that about a third came from women and over a fifth from juveniles under 15.
Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang, Xi'an, China Fingerprints left in the clay suggest that women and adolescents under 15 worked alongside men on China's Terracotta Army. Researchers studied 79 prints on figures from the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, China's first emperor, whose Qin dynasty ruled from 221 to 206 BC.
The team estimates that 45% of the prints came from males, 32.7% from females and 22.3% from juveniles under 15. The work was done by the Emperor Qinshihuang's Mausoleum Site Museum in Xi'an and Shandong University's School of Archaeology in Jinan. It will appear in Volume 82 of the Journal of Cultural Heritage at the end of the year, Sixth Tone reported, citing Chinese media.
Workers long assumed to be men
The tomb holds about 8,000 statues of soldiers and horses, and the team studied a portion of them. Past studies of Qin labour relied mostly on legal texts. These largely treated men as the default workers, and 15 was reportedly the minimum age for service.
Earlier research had also not examined the sexes and ages of the people who made the Terracotta Army. Texts and inscriptions on objects had already cast doubt on the idea that only men worked on the project. According to the report, the new study is the first to estimate the makers' ages and sexes from their fingerprints.
Reading age and sex from ridge thickness
Older studies of ancient fingerprints missed several problems, the researchers said. Women and teenage boys can have similar print size and ridge distribution. Ancient fingerprints may differ in size from modern ones. Clay also shrinks after firing, which changes the prints.
To handle this, the team used a Bayesian mixture model. This is a statistical method that works in probabilities and sorts mixed data into likely groups. The model assigned each fingerprint possible ages and sexes. It analysed the mean ridge breadth, or thickness of the ridges, and compared it with values projected from growth curves.
The model estimated these measures for single individuals and for the population as a whole. The 79 prints were all well preserved. They came from 36 figures in Pit 1 of the mausoleum.
According to the report, the results give quantitative biological evidence against the idea that large-scale Qin craft production relied only on adult male labour. The study also offers a better understanding of the Qin labour system and how apprenticeships were organised.
“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 apprentices.”
The study's authors
The team lists several limits to the results. One person may have left several prints. So the shares of prints from males, females and juveniles may not match the shares of actual workers.
More experienced workers may also have left fewer prints. That may have raised the proportion of juvenile prints. The reference database is another source of doubt. It is based on modern Czech-Caucasian fingerprints, not East Asian ones, and contains more female samples, which the authors say could skew the results.
Sources (1)
Paper: Emperor Qinshihuang's Mausoleum Site Museum and Shandong University School of Archaeology, fingerprint study of Terracotta Army makers, Journal of Cultural Heritage, Volume 82 (forthcoming)
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