The study of seventy-nine fingerprints visible in the clay used to form some of the terracotta warriors in Xi’an, China, has revealed that the makers of the statues included not just adult men but also women and children.
The research was published in the Journal of Cultural Heritage and reported in the magazine Archaeology News. The majority of the prints are located on arms, armor, and heads, the areas where a potter grips and molds the pieces. The spacing between the ridges that make up a fingerprint spread as a person grows.
Ridge spacing on fingertips changes with age and sex. Children have tightly packed ridges that spread as they grow, and adult men have with wider spacing than adult women, though the gap is only about half a millimeter. According to Archaeology News, adult women and teenage boys leave almost identical prints, so past studies struggled to differentiate between them. Also, because clay shrinks by 2 to 12 percent as it dries and gets fired, an old print is smaller than the finger that left it.
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Researchers used a model that examined the entire set of prints at once, checking various possible combinations of age and sex against the measurements and returns ranges and using the prints from living people for comparison. The results attribute 45 percent of the prints to adult men, 33 percent to adult women, and 22 percent to children under the age of fifteen. Qin and Han legal texts set the start of criminal responsibility, forced labor, and military service at fifteen.
The idea of a diverse workforce is supported by written historical records, as Archaeology News reports: “Qin legal texts record convicted women doing earthmoving work beside men, and inscriptions on lacquerware from the period name adult women, girls and boys in state workshops. Bamboo slips from Shuihudi count the work of young slaves as units of production, and slips held by the Yuelu Academy describe apprenticeships in state workshops. At Zhengzhuang, near the mausoleum wall, archaeologists found iron neck collars and leg shackles, direct evidence that convicts worked on the site.”
The research team intends to test other pits containing terracotta warriors and build a larger reference set of prints from ancient Chinese populations.