Rescue Excavation of Mound Tombs in Lishui

The excavation

According to a China News Service report, between April and September 2005, under the coordination of the Jiangsu provincial bureau of cultural relics, eight teams including the Nanjing Museum carried out rescue excavation of mound tombs within Lishui. The report links the work to expressway construction: it was rescue work tied to capital works, not an excavation undertaken for research. The account of how the work was organised is taken by the report from material of the Lishui district cultural relics department.

The finds

The same report records that mound tombs in Lishui most often yield pottery and proto-porcelain, with glazes tending to yellow or green. This is a general statement about mound tombs within Lishui, not a list of finds from any one tomb or cemetery. This entry therefore gives it as "the usual finds of mound tombs within Lishui" and does not assign it to any particular cemetery.

Its relation to the Weijiacun Mound Tombs

The Weijiacun Mound Tombs lie at Weijiacun, Jingqiao Town, Lishui District, date to the Western Zhou to Spring and Autumn period, and were listed in the seventh batch of provincially protected sites in 2011 — the only Lishui entry in that batch. This entry describes the rescue excavation of mound tombs within Lishui as a whole in 2005, of which the Weijiacun cemetery was one part. The report does not say whether the 2005 work touched Weijiacun, and this entry draws no such inference.

The report gives neither the number of mounds nor the extent of the Weijiacun cemetery, and the provincial list and gazette give only period and location; this entry supplies none of them.

Basis for the date

Mound tombs are a burial form of the Western Zhou to Spring and Autumn period in the Jiangnan region, dated from tomb form and grave goods. time.start is set to -1000 (about 1000 BCE), at a precision of century and marked as approximate. The figure is a round number for that period, not the result of any measurement and not the date of any one tomb.

Lishui became a county in the eleventh year of the Kaihuang era (591 CE). The date here falls about fifteen hundred years before that, outside the range of the county's administrative history; the basis is given above, and no finer dating is inferred.

To be added

Still to be added: the excavation areas and division of labour among the eight teams in 2005, the area excavated and the number of tombs, a classified count of the finds, the number and extent of the mounds in the Weijiacun cemetery, and an excavation report devoted to it. Until then, no unverified excavation data will be entered.