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Scientists Find Blood in the Ancient Binding Formula Behind 2,000-Year-Old Huashan Rock Art
China’s 2,000-year-old Huashan rock art has survived on limestone cliffs above the rivers of southern China despite intense heat, monsoon rains and tropical storms that might normally be expected to destroy exposed pigments. A new scientific study suggests that part of the answer lies in an unusual ancient painting formula. Researchers examining the Huashan rock…
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A 3,000-Year-Old Zhou Domain Emerges in China with Thousands of Tombs and Chariot Pits
A vast Western Zhou site in China’s Shaanxi Province is beginning to look less like an isolated cemetery and more like a lost noble domain that once helped anchor royal power on the edge of the Zhou heartland. Archaeologists identified the site at Changchun in Fuping County, where rescue excavations began in 2022 after reports…
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4,000-Year-Old Water System Discovered in China Reveals Sophisticated Urban Planning in the Xia Dynasty
A 4,000-year-old water system discovered in central China is offering one of the clearest pieces of evidence yet that the Xia Dynasty was not a loosely organized early society, but rather a highly coordinated and engineered state with the capacity to design and control its environment on a large scale. Unearthed at the Wangchenggang site…
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A 3,000-Year-Old Mystery: Sanxingdui Artifact May Be Forged from Meteorite Iron
A dark, corroded meteorite iron object lay buried for thousands of years inside a ritual pit in southwestern China. At first, it looked unremarkable. Then scientists analyzed it—and what they found may change how we understand early technology: the Sanxingdui artifact appears to be made from meteorite iron, a material that did not originate on…
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Ancient Chinese Artifact Made from Meteoric Iron Discovered at Sanxingdui
A strange iron object buried for more than three millennia at the ritual complex of Sanxingdui has now been confirmed to come from outer space. Researchers in China have identified the elongated, axe-like artifact as meteoritic iron, making it the oldest and first confirmed example of such material in southern China. The study, published in…
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An Eclipse Recorded 2,700 Years Ago Just Rewrote What We Know About Earth’s Rotation and the Ancient Sun
On a summer morning in 709 BCE, scribes in the court of the ancient Chinese state of Lu recorded a brief but astonishing line: “The Sun was totally eclipsed.”More than two millennia later, that simple sentence—along with a puzzling later note describing an eclipse “yellow above and below”—has now become the key to one of…