New revelations made about Emperor Qin Shi Huang's terracotta warrior army

A study published in the Journal of Cultural Heritage has revealed that an army of terracotta warriors made to accompany Emperor Qin Shi Huang to the afterlife were not made by men alone. Fresh analysis of the figures has revealed that the fingerprints left behind on the statues also belong to women and children.

This clay army was likely made to resemble the people who served Qin in his life, as all of them have different faces. Experts for the longest time believed that only men sculpted them. However, archaeologist Xiaoxi Li, of Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum, studied the terracotta figures again and found something that was hiding in them for more than 2,200 years.

Scientists have known about these fingerprints for years, but had no way to decode the He analysed the finger impressions made on them while they were still wet and got preserved forever after being baked in fire. They belong to not only adult men, but also women and children. This is the first time that biological evidence has been provided from the figures.

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“These findings challenge the long-held assumption that Terracotta Army production relied exclusively on adult male labour, providing the first quantitative biological evidence for a diverse workforce including women and children,” he said.

Nearly 10,000 figures were made in the army

This is likely because of the sheer scale of the project. It comprises nearly 8,000 life-size figures, 130 chariots drawn by 520 horses, and another 150 cavalry horses. Past studies have mainly focussed on how so many figures were made. Signs of who made them was only slightly seen in the workshop marks, such as the character “Gong” (宫) or “Xianyang” (咸阳). The variations in clay composition suggested that specific body parts were produced in separate workshops.

Men were believed to be the only creators of these terracotta figures. However, inscriptions on lacquerware from the same period show that women, boys, and girls were also involved in laborious tasks. Researchers digitally enhanced clear, distortion-free photos of fingerprints found on ceramic warriors from a tomb complex excavation unit. The team identified 79 distinct prints across 36 statues, most of which were on heads and arms.

The spacing between the ridges of the fingers gave away the makers, as wider spacing is found in adults, and it is narrow in younger people.

Researchers also noted that only about 45 per cent of the prints belonged to adult men. Nearly 33 per cent belonged to adult women, and 22 per cent were of children under the age of 15. Notwithstanding these limitations, this study marks an important methodological breakthrough in Terracotta Army archaeology,” said Li.