The excavation of Yelü Hongli’s tomb in Beizhen City, Liaoning

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 122-134

Abstract In September through November 2015, Liaoning Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and other institutions excavated Yelü Hongli’s tomb of the Liao Dynasty. This was a large-scale brick-chamber tomb consisting of the passage, ventilation shafts, entrance, corridor and tomb chamber; albeit having been looted in early years, many grave goods including silver wares, bronzes, iron objects, porcelains, wooden objects, jades, stone implements were unearthed, as well as architectural components and stone epitaph, and wooden coffin and bier were also preserved. This tomb located in Han Derang’s family cemetery, which was a part of the attendant burials of the Xianling and Qianling Mausoleums of the Liao Dynasty, was a tomb with exact date and yielding rich artifacts, and this was rare in the elite burials of the late Liao Dynasty, so it is significantly meaningful for the study on the burial system of the Liao Dynasty.

2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  

AbstractThe tomb of Bai, Lord of the State of Zhongli, located in Shuangdun Village, Bengbu City, Anhui, was excavated by the Anhui Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and the Bengbu Museum from December 2006 through August 2008. This tomb was a large-scale vertical earthen shaft pit tomb with a tumulus at ground level; the grave was in a circular plan with a ring-shaped ledge of primary soil 2m below the opening. The tomb passageway was situated to the precise east of the grave. In the tumulus and the tomb fill, “five-colored soil”, a buffer layer of white clay, “radial lines”, earthen “hillocks”, and “clay figurine walls” were recovered, and the tomb chamber was cross-shaped. The structure was original and the remains were complex; the grave goods were very rich, with over 500 items recovered, including bronze bells,


Author(s):  
David O'Brien

The Uyghur (alternatively spelled Uighur) are the largest and titular ethnic group living in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, a vast area in northwestern China of over 1.6 million sq. km. According to the 2010 census Uyghurs make up 45.21 percent of the population of Xinjiang, numbering 8,345,622 people. The Han, the largest ethnic group in China, make up 40.58 percent in the region with 7,489,919. A Turkic-speaking largely Muslim ethnic group, the Uyghurs traditionally inhabited a series of oases around the Taklamakan desert. Their complex origin is evidenced by a rich cultural history that can be traced back to various groups that emerged across the steppes of Mongolia and Central Asia. Uyghur communities are also found in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan, with significant diaspora groups in Australia, the United States, Germany, and Turkey. In the first half of the 20th century, Uyghurs briefly declared two short-lived East Turkestan Republics in 1933 and again in 1944, but the region was brought under the complete control of the Chinese state after the Communist Party (CCP) came to power in 1949. Within China they are considered one of the fifty-five officially recognized ethnic minority groups, who, along with the Han who constitute 92 percent of the population, make up the Chinese nation or Zhonghua Minzu中华民族. However, for many Uyghurs the name “Xinjiang,” which literally translates as “New Territory,” indicates that their homeland is a colony of China, and they prefer the term “East Turkestan.” Nevertheless, many scholars use Xinjiang as a natural term even when they are critical of the position of the Communist Party. In this article both terms are used. In the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Uyghurs numbered about 80 percent of the population of Xinjiang, but large-scale government-sponsored migration has seen the number of Han in the region rise to almost the same as that of the Uyghur. This has led to an increase in ethnic tensions often caused by competition for scarce resources and a perception that the ruling Communist Party favors the Han. In 2009, a major outbreak of violence in the capital Ürümchi saw hundreds die and many more imprisoned. The years 2013 and 2014 were also crucial turning points with deadly attacks on passengers in train stations in Kunming and Yunnan, bombings in Ürümchi, and a suicide attack in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, all blamed on Uyghur terrorists. Since then the Chinese government has introduced a harsh regime of security clampdowns and mass surveillance, which has significantly increased from 2017 and which, by some accounts, has seen over one million Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities imprisoned without trial in “reeducation” camps. The Chinese government insist these camps form part of an education and vocational training program designed to improve the lives of Uyghurs and root out “wrong thinking.” Many Uyghurs believe it is part of a long-term project of assimilation of Uyghur identity and culture.


2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-88 ◽  

Abstract In 2013, the Department of Archaeology, School of History of Wuhan University and the Panlongcheng City Ruins Museum excavated seven burials of the Shang Dynasty at Yangjiawan Locality within the Panlongcheng Site in Wuhan City. All the burials were vertical earthen shaft burials. Some of the burials featured waist pits, human and/or animal sacrifices. The grave goods assemblage included artifacts made of bronze, jade, stone, pottery, gold and turquoise. Some of the unearthed objects were seen for the first time in the archaeology of Panlongcheng. The burials can be roughly dated to the terminal phase of the Panlongcheng Site. The Yangjiawan Locality yielded the densest distribution of burials in the Panlongcheng Site. It was an important cemetery of the early to the mid Shang Dynasty. The cemetery was in close proximity to a previously excavated large-scale architectural foundation of the Shang Dynasty. Together, these findings are important information for the understanding of the layout of the Panlongcheng Site.


Entropy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (10) ◽  
pp. 1168
Author(s):  
Min Zhang ◽  
Guohua Geng ◽  
Sheng Zeng ◽  
Huaping Jia

Knowledge graph completion can make knowledge graphs more complete, which is a meaningful research topic. However, the existing methods do not make full use of entity semantic information. Another challenge is that a deep model requires large-scale manually labelled data, which greatly increases manual labour. In order to alleviate the scarcity of labelled data in the field of cultural relics and capture the rich semantic information of entities, this paper proposes a model based on the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) with entity-type information for the knowledge graph completion of the Chinese texts of cultural relics. In this work, the knowledge graph completion task is treated as a classification task, while the entities, relations and entity-type information are integrated as a textual sequence, and the Chinese characters are used as a token unit in which input representation is constructed by summing token, segment and position embeddings. A small number of labelled data are used to pre-train the model, and then, a large number of unlabelled data are used to fine-tune the pre-training model. The experiment results show that the BERT-KGC model with entity-type information can enrich the semantics information of the entities to reduce the degree of ambiguity of the entities and relations to some degree and achieve more effective performance than the baselines in triple classification, link prediction and relation prediction tasks using 35% of the labelled data of cultural relics.


2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-80 ◽  

Abstract Fuquanshan Site is a central settlement site of the Liangzhu Culture. The 2010 excavation in the Wujiachang locality of Fuquanshan Site was productive. The relatively small excavation area of 231sqm yielded six burials, 14 ash pits, three ash ditches, and one water well. Four of the burials were dated to the Liangzhu Age. The Liangzhu grave goods assemblage was exceptionally rich. It comprised more than 400 artifacts that included sumptuous objects of jade cong-tubes, jade bi-discs, jade yue-battle axes, ivory scepters, etc. Their presence suggested that M204 and M207 were elite burials. The complete removal of feature M207 from the field allowed meticulous excavation of the burial in the convenience of laboratory environment, as well as the immediate preservation of the uncovered cultural relics. The deposition indicated that Wujiachang was an artificial mound cemetery of the elites of the Liangzhu Culture.


2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-111
Author(s):  
Mohamad Sedighi ◽  
Dick van Gameren

This article discusses the transformation of the traditional Iranian courtyard house type and neighbourhood structure in the early 20th century Iran, and focuses on the design of public housing in the country’s early years of modernisation, after the second World War. It explores how (urban) legislations by Iranian reformists and modernists, and the compulsory unveiling law implemented between 1936 and 1943 contributed to change the image of urban areas and the everyday life of Iranians, particularly in Tehran. While this article provides a short overview of these transformations, it discusses how Iranian architects, educated in Europe, attempted to reconceptualise the ideal form of living, the courtyard-garden house (Khaneh-Bagh), for large-scale housing production, in the country. This article shows how the transformation of this house type became an instrument of accommodating both change and resistance in terms of local customs and habits, in Kuy-e Chaharsad-Dastgah, built between 1946 and 1950 in Tehran. To illustrate these, the design and development of this experimental housing project is analysed in details. It is also demonstrated how this project was developed based on a “planning document” revised by a group of modernist Iranian architects, who intended to improve the hygiene condition of living environments and to accommodate a large number of low-income civil servants in post-World War II, Tehran. It is argued that dual characteristics of the Iranian courtyard house allowed for both incorporating imported models, and simultaneously resisting universalising tendencies towards homogenisation, in the case of Chaharsad-Dastgah.


2021 ◽  
Vol 108 (Supplement_6) ◽  
Author(s):  
M Kelada ◽  
M Kawka ◽  
J Komor

Abstract Aim Early exposure to surgery has been found to impact medical students’ decisions to pursue a career in surgery. Despite this, students are often not exposed to surgical specialties until senior years of medical school. The aim of this study was to determine if a student-led, three-month online lecture series can facilitate early exposure to surgical careers. Method Participants volunteered to complete pre- and post-lecture questionnaires. The four domains discussed across the lecture series included: what a surgical career entails, the day-to-day life of a surgeon, advances in surgery and surgical portfolio. Participants self-rated confidence in the knowledge of each of the four domains was measured on a five-step Likert scale. Changes in perceived confidence were measured using a paired Student’s t-test. Data were analysed using R 4.03 (Vienna, Austria). The threshold of significance was <0.05. Results A total of 45 respondents completed both pre- and post-lecture questionnaires. Most respondents (57.8%) were first- or second-year students. Following the course, there was a significant increase in confidence across all four domains investigated (mean rating 2.64 vs 4.07, p < 0.001). More than 9 out of 10 respondents (99.3%) gained new knowledge and (95.2%) agreed that an online event format did not hinder their learning. Conclusions Student-led online lecture series can increase knowledge of core concepts pertaining to a career in surgery for pre-clinical students. The findings provide a basis for further large-scale investigation of surgical education during early years of medical school and for the potential value of extracurricular, student- or trainee-led courses.


2016 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 125
Author(s):  
Stuart A. Browning ◽  
Ian D. Goodwin

Subtropical maritime low-pressure systems are one of the most complex and destructive storm types to impact Australia’s eastern seaboard. This family of storms, commonly referred to as East Coast Cyclones (ECC), is most active during the late autumn and early winter period when baroclinicity increases in the Tasman Sea region. ECC have proven challenging to forecast at both event and seasonal timescales. Storm activity datasets, objectively determined from reanalyses using cyclone detection algorithms, have improved understanding of the drivers of ECC over the era of satellite data coverage. In this study we attempt to extend these datasets back to 1851 using the Twentieth Century Reanalysis version 2c (20CRv2c). However, uncertainty in the 20CRv2c increases back through time due to observational data scarcity, and individual cyclones counts tend to be underestimated during the 19th century. An alternative approach is explored whereby storm activity is estimated from seasonal atmosphere-ocean circulation patterns. Seasonal ECC frequency over the 1955 to 2014 period is significantly correlated to regional sea-level pressure and sea surface temperature (SST) patterns. These patterns are used to downscale the 20CRv2c during early years when individual events are not well simulated. The stormiest periods since 1851 appear to have been 1870 to the early 1890s, and 1950 to the early 1970s. Total storm activity has been below the long-term average for most winters since 1976. Conditions conducive to frequent ECC events tend to occur during periods of relatively warm SST in the southwest Pacific typical of negative Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO-ve). Extratropical cyclogenesis is associated with negative Southern Annular Mode (SAM-ve) and blocking in the southern Tasman Sea. Subtropical cyclogenesis is associated with SAM+ve and blocking in the central Tasman Sea. While the downscaling approach shows some skill at estimating seasonal storm activity from the large-scale circulation, it cannot overcome data scarcity based uncertainties in the 19th century when the 20CRv2c is effectively unconstrained throughout most of the southern hemisphere. Storm frequency estimates during the 19th century are difficult to verify and should be interpreted cautiously and with reference to available documentary evidence.


2006 ◽  
Vol 45 (4II) ◽  
pp. 689-700 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tariq Mahmood ◽  
Ejaz Ghani ◽  
Musleh-Ud Din

The large scale manufacturing sector in Pakistan has gained increasing prominence over the years with its share in output rising to about 13 percent in 2005-06 from 5.67 percent in 1959-60.1 The sector has operated amid varying policy environments ranging from outright import substitution in the early years to a more deregulated and liberal environment in the recent years driven largely by concerns to improve the efficiency of the industrial sector which is critical for attaining greater competitiveness. While industrial and trade policy reforms in recent years have exposed domestic enterprises to greater internal and external competition, most of these enterprises continue to seek state patronage and have yet to reposition themselves to compete effectively in the global market place. Furthermore, the trade policy still has an import substitution bias for certain critical sectors whose imports are subject to tariff peaks and this raises concerns on their efficiency. This study aims to assess the efficiency of large scale manufacturing sector in Pakistan using the production frontier approach. Section 2 reviews the literature while Section 3 sets out the methodology and discusses data employed in the study. Section 4 analyses empirical findings, and Section 5 concludes the discussion.


2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  

AbstractThe tomb of the Spring-and-Autumn Period at Jiwang Gu (Jiwang Mesa) is a stone shaft pit tomb with wooden chamber cut out of the rock on the top of the mesa; it consists of the grave, the passageway and the chariot-and- horse pit, and the grave and the chariot-and-horse pit are in the same rock pit. The grave is partitioned into the outer coffin chamber, the inner coffin chamber, two nested coffins, two storage boxes and three human victim pits. From this tomb, large amounts of jades, bronzes and other artifacts about 200 pieces (or sets) in total were unearthed. This tomb has large scale, high rank, special structure and rich grave goods, all of which are significantly meaningful for the researches on the cultures and burial system of this region during the Eastern Zhou Period.


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