A Collaborative Research Initiative on Iron Use in the First Emperor's Mausoleum and Qin Dynasty

Summary

This is an abstract from the "New materials and new insights for our understanding of the First Emperor's Mausoleum and early imperial China" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

A collaboration between the Terracotta Army Museum and UCL has for many years been investigating the crafting methods and logistical organisation behind the making of the Terracotta Army and the First Emperor's mausoleum. Bronze, clay, wood and other resources were all deployed on a massive scale and their monumental use at this funerary site provides important wider clues about everyday marshalling of resources by the Qin empire. It can also be compared with other systematic new industrial crafting methods that were emerging in other near-contemporary, large-scale empires across Asia and Europe during the 1st millennium BCE. While we have previously focused on bronze and terracotta, two new recent agendas consider wood and iron. This paper will introduce the second of these: a project called "Qin Imperial Iron, Tomb M1 and the First Emperor's Mausoleum: Character, Context and Consequence". In contrast to bronze weapons, the hundreds of iron tools and small number of weapons found within the mausoleum have received far less attention so far, and in particular, new excavations at ancillary tomb M1 and the East Gate have yielded insightful finds.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• New materials and new insights for our understanding of the First Emperor's Mausoleum and early imperial China

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51012