Survey, Excavation, and Geophysics at Songjiaheba—A Small Bronze Age Site in the Chengdu Plain

Abstract

The Chengdu 成都 Plain, in the northwest corner of the Sichuan 四川Basin (Figure 1), was the setting for the emergence of a complex civilization in the second millennium BC. This civilization is most notably associated with the site of Sanxingdui 三星堆, in Guanghan 廣漢, where two sacrificial pits discovered in 1986 revealed a rich and unexpected collection of jade objects, ceramics, elephant tusks, and elaborate bronze and gold objects (Bagley 2001; Flad 2012; Sichuan 1999). The discovery of the Sanxingdui pits was followed by research at other sites in the Chengdu Plain, including several loci in the city of Chengdu that post-date Sanxingdui, such as an elite residential location called Shi’erqiao 十二橋 (Sichuan et al. 1987; Jiang 1998), a zone of ritual deposits, cemeteries, and settlement areas named Jinsha 金沙 (Chengdu Institute 2006; Chengdu & Beijing 2002; Zhu et al. 2003), and Shangyejie 商業街, a Late Bronze Age elite burial site with large log coffins filled with lacquers and other elite objects (Chengdu 2002). Based on the excavations of these sites, we now know that bronze-producing communities that commanded multi-community networks of resource acquisition existed in the 2 Chengdu Plain starting at least as early as the middle of the second millennium BC (Flad and Chen 2013).