Fingerprints suggest women and children helped make China's Terracotta Army
A new analysis of prints left in the clay of the 2,000-year-old warriors suggests the workforce was more varied than the adult male craftsmen long assumed.
Women and children may have helped to build China’s famous Terracotta Army, according to a new study of fingerprints pressed into the clay. If the finding holds, it challenges the long-standing belief that only adult men made the warriors.
The army, around 8,000 figures strong, was buried with China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who died in 210 B.C.E. It lay forgotten for over 2,000 years, until farmers digging a well in the north-west of the country stumbled upon it in 1974. No two soldiers are alike, which is no mean feat across a force of that size.
Archaeologist Xiaoxi Li, of the Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s Mausoleum Site Museum, led a team that studied 79 well-preserved fingerprints found on 36 of the warriors. By their estimates, 45 percent came from adult women and 33 percent from adult men. The last 22 percent were left by juveniles, which the paper defines as people under 15.
Reading age and sex from a fingerprint is harder than it sounds. Standard methods look at how far apart the ridges are, but the prints of adult women and teenage boys can be almost indistinguishable. The shrinking of clay as it is fired adds yet another wrinkle.
So the team turned to a statistical technique that considers the prints as a group rather than judging each in isolation. It weighs up many possible mixes of ages and sexes and reports ranges of probability instead of firm answers. The authors call their results “compelling, biologically grounded evidence” of a diverse workforce.
They are, however, admirably cautious. The sample was small and came from only one of the army’s three pits, and a single person might have left prints on several figures. Novices were also more likely than trained artisans to leave marks behind, since experienced hands may have smoothed theirs away.
There is some supporting evidence from elsewhere. Qin-era lacquer objects found in Hubei Province carry inscriptions that mention adult women, young women and young boys, showing that women and children worked on lacquer under state supervision.
Why it matters
History tends to remember emperors and master craftsmen, while the many ordinary people who did the work go unrecorded. Fingerprints are a rare, direct trace of those individuals, and they hint that one of the ancient world’s most ambitious projects drew on a much broader slice of society than had been supposed. The study is a cautious first step, but it shows how modern methods can still coax fresh stories from a site discovered half a century ago.
