Stone Armor 2,200 Years Ago: Large-Scale Specialized Workshop in Early China

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Stone armor was unearthed in Pit K9801 of the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor in 1998. In 2001, a large number of stone armor semi-finished products and processing tools were again discovered in a well of Qin Dynasty in Xinfeng Town on the south bank of the Wei River, clarifying for the first time where stone armor was produced. In 2019, stone armor was also found in the Liujiagou site(LJGS), the core area of Xianyang city which is the capital of Qin Dynasty, by the Shaanxi Academy of Archaeology. The site unearthed a large number of semi-finished and salvaged stone armor plates as well as processing tools. The form of these stone armor is consistent with those excavated from the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor and the well in Xinfeng town. This paper focusing on stone armor’s production process divided by production stage is a compendium of the stone armor unearthed in 2019. In the process of recovering the production process, the reasons for the abandonment of the stone armor are clarified, and some of the broken but highly finished armor plates are corresponded to the parts of the sets of armor to which they belong.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37094.0