Chinese archaeologists have used new technology to ascertain the carbonized texture residue in an urn coffin buried in the Neolithic Yangshao Culture ruins in central China's Henan Province as the world's earliest found silk fabrics.
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Carbonized silk fabrics unearthed from the Wanggou site in Liyang [Credit: China News Agency] |
Gu Wanfa, director of the Zhengzhou Municipal Research Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, said that a cluster of the Yangshao Culture ruins dating back 5,000 to 7,000 years have been found in Henan. In addition to the silk fabrics at the Wanggou site, the same fabrics were unearthed at the Qingtai site and there are bone carvings of silkworms found at the Shuanghuaishu site. All are solid evidence to prove that the ancient Chinese began raising silkworms and silk production more than 5,000 years ago.
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Carbonized silk fabrics unearthed from the Wanggou site in Liyang [Credit: China News Agency] |
He said through electron microscopic observation, they found fine yarns in the silk fabrics woven using four-warp twisted rods.
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Urn coffin from which the carbonized silk was retrieved [Credit: China News Agency] |
He said one of the fabrics was leno dyed before the weaving process. The ancestors developed the method of cooking the silk to prevent the dye from fading.
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Archaeologists extracting the carbonized silk fabric from a coffin [Credit: China News Agency] |
In 2010, the China National Silk Museum began key scientific research set up by the National Cultural Heritage Administration on the origin of silk.
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The Shuanghuai site in Gongyi, Henan [Credit: China News Agency] |
The urn coffin burial found in Yangshao in central China actually resembles the shape of a silkworm pupae, which might imply ancient worship wishing that the dead can be reborn after death as a silk moth after it breaks through the cocoon, said Zhao Feng.
Source: Xinhua News Agency [December 05, 2019]
* This article was originally published here
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