Legacies longer than lifetimes

Extended connections

"This cemetery demonstrates that these people have maintained the traditional funeral customs of their own group for a long time. … Moreover, archaeometric analysis reveals they probably had close links with some groups like the Qiang ethnic group, and Di and Rong tribes," says Chai.

Although owners of the cemetery probably belonged to a non-Han group, the features of the cemetery, including the layout of the tombs and the unearthed artifacts like clay figurines, coins and bronze mirrors, are not very different from those of the contemporaneous culture from Central China. This reveals cultural communication and integration at that time, says Jiao Nanfeng, a researcher at the Shaanxi Academy of Archaeology.

The Sixteen Kingdoms period marked a time of wars and short-lived regimes established by many different people. But it was also crucial to the cultural exchanges that formed the shared community of the Chinese nation.

Chai also mentions most of these people mostly ate plant-based food, complemented by some meat.

Moreover, the grades of the tombs seem to gradually decline across the three periods.

During the Sixteen Kingdoms, the tombs were large and for middle-class officials or aristocracy, as demonstrated by their scale and unearthed artifacts. But from the Northern Wei to Western Wei, the tombs were middle-sized, with far fewer burial objects. In the latest period, the tombs were small and probably for ordinary people, according to Chai.

"Through these discoveries, we can infer that these people had a high social status during the Sixteen Kingdoms period," she says.

"Although they still had some status from the Northern Wei to the Western Wei periods, they obviously saw it decline as compared with before. In the last period, they were not different from ordinary people. It shows the dynamic changes in the cemetery across time," says Chai.

According to Jiao, the cemetery can be regarded as an important discovery in the history of China's archaeological studies of tombs.

"The Beichengcun site is a large-scale graveyard from the Sixteen Kingdoms period, Northern Dynasty (386-581), Sui and Tang periods. It has a long history and is well-preserved," says Jiao.

"It was used for more than 300 years. In ancient China, about 20 years was a generation. By this measurement, about 15 generations of people were buried in this cemetery.

"Its legacy spans such a long time, and its tombs, which are around the same sizes, are distributed in an orderly fashion. … We haven't seen another contemporaneous cemetery like this in China," he adds.

According to Jiao, archaeologists didn't know much about tombs from the Sixteen Kingdoms period until recently. This graveyard hosts the largest number of graves dating to that period discovered at a single site, he adds.

Chai says DNA analyses will be conducted on all of the human bones to get more information about these people.