Jinsha Site Museum

break


Some of the Chinese professors who run this program set up a field trip for us (read totally free and we get driven around). We went to the JinSha Site Museum. It's in Chengdu, we took minivans, fun times. In 2001 when getting ready to lay foundation a real estate company found artifacts. Since then excavation has been going non stop. Around some of the sites have been built huge museums, exhibition halls. You can walk amongst the sites on raised boardwalks. The best stuff that has been found is very well displayed through many smaller rooms. It was beautiful and well designed. They have room for expansion. The land surrounding the museum looks like a park. It's all well kept and kids were running around. The whole site covers many kilometers, and there are many different places where excavation is going on. The main site is a religious complex. Most of the artifacts they are recovering are 2,000 to 3,000 years old.



So I wasn't going to blog that I was sick. But I can't really get away with just saying I didn't pay attention on a museum tour, that's really not in my personality. I got sick last week. I just had a stomach thing. I missed two days of class, and spent one day in bed. The field trip was the second day of my illness, I wasn't really over it yet, but I felt better. I ate some bread for lunch and then tried to go on the field trip. My stomach really hated that bread, I had really bad tension, it felt like I had eaten a rock. So I was in a lot of pain and very tired, so I missed out on a lot of the educational stuff going on around me. I thought it was a beautiful trip though, and I think when Tanner comes I'll take him back to the museum.

This was the first gold mask found at the site. It's beautiful and so very delicate. It is also tiny, you don't really get the scale in the photograph. It's smaller than the palm of my hand. I was pretty amazed.


There were beautiful works in jade as well. It was dim so I didn't take very many photos since they were blurred.
One of the more important finds are a whole bunch of elephant tusks. They found them whole and in pieces or carved for tool use and decoration. It helped the anthropologists determine that the climate in the Sichuan basin was much warmer when the settlements they are studying were alive. So that was interesting.


One of the things every loved best at the museum was an enormous root. It was the size of someones living room. It was preserved almost entirely intact. They can exposed it and then built a glass floor above it. The tree was thousands of years old when it died and then was preserved for another few thousand years.






The treat for us American students was a trip to a recent dig near the museums. It was maybe ten minutes away by car. It was just a lot in between some apartment blocks and some construction. I guess the top layers were destroyed by the construction. They were already working on deeper layers of soil, and finding very old artifacts. I was really surprised that the dig was only five days old. We were really there. Older men and women were using hoes and shovels to clear away layers of soil. All of them were watched over by Chinese students with clipboards, trowels and zip lock baggies for anything they found. I was having a hard time picturing Indiana Jones running around, but I tried.



I really loved this woman's hair.



As we started to tune out the explanations in Chinese and wander around we ended up all finding and standing near the SKELETON! I mean really! I got to walk around a fresh dig sit with very little supervision. We chatted with the Chinese graduate students. We got to examine a skeleton, I am pretty sure they told us he was 800 years old, up close and personal. The graduate student in whose plot it was found was beaming, he was so happy to tell us all about it.




The site was actually really surprising. It was very informal. It was Friday afternoon and there were kids running around. The children of local neighbors and some of the adults working there.
It was also an image that is commonly used to explain China today. In front of us was a potentially important archaeological site and right behind it we could watch more buildings going up. It definitely is not such a cliche when you are actually standing there watching it all.



I ate a real dinner and real lunch today without feeling sick, so I am all better. I have also been away from home for two months now. I have been a little sad and lazy the last two weeks, getting sick just made me fed up. So I gave myself a pep talk and have woke up feeling much happier and more optimistic the past two days. I got a few things done, and doing one things leads me to to another. So I think I can catch up in a few weeks in my classes, well before Tanner gets here.

I also need to CONGRATULATE RHEA! I just found out today that she was accepted into the study abroad program she wanted to do. I know it is through the English Department at the UW. She'll study in London for one quarter this spring. I think it's a literature studies seminar. It won't put off her graduation (which will most likely happen before or at the same time as mine). So it sounds like she really picked the best program and they wanted her. I am so happy AND so upset that I won't be able to visit!